Anne Braden interview

This is an interview with Anne Braden, close associate of Fred
Shuttlesworth in the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.
The interview was conducted at her horne in Louisville, Kentucky, on
October 29, 1988, by Andrew Manis.
ANDREW MANIS: Do you remember the circumstances of your first
meeting with Reverend Shuttlesworth?
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, I remember it very vividly. Just to sort of
explain or give you a meaningful picture regarding my association
with Shuttlesworth, I need to ask you a couple of questions. In
your research, have you done any sort of thinking about looking
into the whole red scare of the fifties?
ANDREW MANIS: I've seen some of it from articles in the Southern
Patriot.
ANNE BRADEN: You read Southern· Patriot?
ANDREW MANIS: And so I know the kind of thing that happened with
(Jim) Dombrowski in New Orleans but it is still very hazy. At this
point I haven't pieced it all together. I know the basic
background.
ANNE BRADEN: You're not quite sure what it is all about? It would
take a short interview to tell you what it was all about, but from
my point of view it was a very important part of history in our
country and the world. I will have to allude to it a number of
times because my relationship with Shuttlesworth was very much tied
up with that. It reveals a certain part of his character which I
think is very important, but may not come out in other things. Let
me just sort of state the thesis and then I'll tell you what I
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mean. See, in that period, 1957, I forgot exactly when I first met
him but I remember it quite vividly -- beginning in 1957 when I
first met him and until the present really, I feel very close to
Shuttlesworth. We see each other a lot now. Considering he lives
a hundred miles from here, not a lot. I haven't seen him on a
daily basis but he is one of the people I am really close to and
I feel I have worked closely with him for years. I don't want to
talk about myself, but to understand what Shuttlesworth is all
about, you have to know a little bit about me to understand his
relationship with me and my husband and the other people I work
with.
ANDREW MANIS: Feel free.
ANNE BRADEN: The thing that always struck me, and I will just try
to summarize this. It took a lot of courage for people to do the
kind of things that were done in terms of what was happening in the
south in that period and I think Shuttlesworth is probably the most
courageous person I ever knew in my life. But there are different
kinds of courage. I've thought about that many times and it takes
a lot of physical courage to go walking to Phillips High School
like he did, you know. 11m sure you have talked to him about it,
and have your life threatened, face the fire hose, and a lot of
such things. That takes physical courage. A lot of people had
that type of courage or we wouldn't be where we are tOday. But
there was another thing going on in that period in which there was
a whole attack on a lot of people associated with the civil rights
movement as being communist, as being subversive, as being traitors
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to the country, especially on whites who supported the civil rights
movement. It's not quite that simple but that is the way it came
out. I was one of the people who was under attack like that. I 'm
sure if you've lived in Louisville, you've heard a little about
that. That I was a symbol, sort of. It didn't have much to do
with what I really was. But I remember other people I worked with
but I was in the position, I have thought about a lot of this
history, I mean, I really had to fight for my right to be a part of
the civil rights movement. Some people didn't believe me when I
said that. I have just been at a women's conference in Atlanta
about women in the civil rights movement at the King Center at and
Georgia State University.
ANDREW MANIS: I was there right before it started.
ANNE BRADEN: It was very interesting really. There were a lot of
women who carne. There was a mixture of scholars. But a lot of
younger people ignored me when I said that, you see. Because I was
always attacked as being subversive. Now this I know was serious
stuff in the 1950s. So a lot of people were afraid to associate
with me. It is so much a part of my life that it is hard to say it
but see, you live in a different period of history and might not
realize how hysterical things were.
and other people connected with
Not only me, Jim Dombrowski,
SCEF (Southern Conference
Educational Fund), and there's a history to that, and I may come
back to that a little bit, to show you where it was . Anyway,
people reacted in different ways to that. It's a good study of
human beings.
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ANDREW MANIS: When you say people, you mean blacks in the civil
rights?
ANNE BRADEN: Blacks and whites and everybody in this country who
fit in with blacks in the civil rights movement but .
ANDREW MANIS: I assume that's what you meant when you said you had
to fight for your right to be in the movement?
ANNE BRADEN: Dh yeah, but that was in the context of people
reacting in interesting ways to that sort of fear and people did
some strange things and it produced some really cowardly sort of
things, it produced people betraying their friends, and it produced
some really courageous things, too, and you can see the human
character in times of stress. At that level, just like you can in
Birmingham with the fire hoses at a different level. No, there
were people who were a part of the civil rights upsurge that we
went on and who for one reason or another were very cautious about
associating with anybody who had a subversive label. I would say
hostile. The hostile people were usually white, really, and there
were some of the white liberals who were afraid of getting too
labeled and didn't want to associate with people like us. But some
of the blacks were very legitimately cautious. Why take this on,
when they have all this other?
ANDREW MANIS: Can you name some names of those who were cautious?
ANNE BRADEN: Who was cautious? I'm not sure I want to be quoted
on that because some of them have come around since, you know. I
don't know. Let me think about that. Yeah, I think there is ??
ahead.
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ANDREW MANIS: You notice I said "naming some names."
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, it took the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, which, of course, when I first met Fred, hadn't formed
yet. I think in that year it formed, but within the Southern
Leadership Conference, in that nucleus of leadership, there were
big debates as to whether they would cooperate with SCEF on things.
Now, Martin Luther King, you're not writing about him, at the
nodding point, came to that realization and it took some struggle
on his part. I spent hours talking with him and other people did.
And it took some other people who didn't. He was under terrific
pressure but he did, I think, take a heroic part . He was resisting
this sort of fear and derision. A lot of people don't know that
story. That's not what you're writing about. I wondered why his
biographers have avoided it so. They don't really want to deal with
it twenty years later, but I told a lot about it.
ANDREW MANIS: Feel free to tell that story .
ANNE BRADEN: It ties in with Fred later and we will come to that.
But I think he was very courageous because of the things he did in
regard to me and my husband, there was nothing in it for him. It
was just a matter of principle. Anyway, it is very hard, I am sure
to imagine, I don't know how you can capture it in a book, but you
didn't live in that time, how afraid people were . So that the
phenomenon that I saw a number of times that people had physical
courage I more that I have , and I thought I had much, and would
stand up to the fear of death, could not stand up to the thought of
being called a traitor to their country and the atmosphere that was
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going on. So, there are two kinds of courage. One is physical
courage and one is moral courage. I remember sitting around one
time where we were at some meeting after being in somebody ' s hotel
room . Andy Young was there. This must have been late fifties or
early sixties . I was saying there were different kinds of courage
and I said, "There's physical courage and there is moral courage.
And as we talk about these things, I really don't think I have much
physical courage. 1I (Laughs.) The reason I wanted to put it in
this context is that Fred Shuttlesworth, as much as anybody I can
think of, had both. And I think that, I hope that, once you write
about him, you will touch on both because I think that his physical
courage and the fact that, if there hadn't been someone like Fred
in Birmingham, I don't know whether we would ever have broken this
segregation thing. He was the man for the job because it took
somebody like Fred . And I 'm talking about physical courage who had
the pure guts, and sometimes almost by himself. Now he rallied
around him a mass movement but he probably got some enemies from
it . In the beginning he was just there by himself, by God, he was
going to stand up. I 'm not sure that the whole back of segregation
could have been broken without somebody like that and probably,
theologically, he would say this, too. My theology's different but
God sent him to do this, see, because there had to be somebody like
that. Maybe God did because I don ' t know that it ever would have
happened otherwise . I 'm getting ahead of my story . I 'm leaving
out a part I want to get back to. There were weaknesses in that as
I am sure you discern because he was a one man leader. I think.
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But it was that terrific courage that was an audaciousness -- to
take on Bull Connor -- that was uncommon. People rallied around
that but they rallied around Fred as a great leader. I don't think
Fred ever thought of himself as a great leader, but he functioned
that way, and in those days, I think Fred has changed a lot through
the years, he's terrifically sensitive and smart. You know, he
picks up things. But he wasn't the most democratic person. Well,
black preachers are maybe preachers, but they rule with an iron
hand, especially the Baptists. You know, you're a Baptist. You
may -- the Baptists always say they run a democratic denomination
because there is no bishop telling them what to do but the preacher
rules his church with an iron hand. It's that kind of condition,
but I think -- and I think that Fred would say this now, that -now
he left there and after his move he still went back there as a
leader for years and still is in a way. In more recent years he
has commuted to Birmingham. But he didn't develop a lot of leaders
he left behind. NOw, I think that over the years when he first was
active in SCEf a lot of the young people thought Fred was sort of
a dictator, I think that over the years he developed a much more
democratic approach, much more of interest in involving other
people. But, I think that most of us have strong qualities, but
the other side of that coin is our weakness. The fact is that Fred
was undemocratic and that he was a one man show or whatever, that
was what Birmingham needed at that time. So, the main point I was
thinking about was that he had this tremendous courage that he
needed but he had the other kind of courage, too, in terms of he
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did not care what people said. If he decided who his friends were
he was not going to let anyone tell him who to associate with them.
Now I don't know where he got that and I think -- I don't know -maybe
you can relate it to your theology because in times I think
refusal to be afraid of associating with people like us, it was not
the main background of study that this was all about. It was just
some gut thing, I think, that he wasn't going to let anybody tell
him, so those are general things, the way I see them. I have seen
so very -- and the others of course, and I don't think Fred, in
fact, I have tried to encourage him to move back to Birmingham to
retire and lead the movement there today, you know, the regional
movement, which we are in the process of building. I think he
might like to make a living as he does it. But I think -- I don't
think any story of him is complete without this element. That's
what I am trying to say. So, that is the background. The first
time I met him was June, 1957. I can remember the date because it
was connected with other things. My husband, Carl, and I went to
Birmingham to meet with Jim Dombrowski, you probably don't know who
he was, and Aubrey Williams, who was president of SCEF. Jim didn't
know Fred either. I don't believe he had met him at that time. We
went down there to Birmingham on a weekend to talk with Jim and
Aubrey about our going to work for SCEF on the SCEF staff. Because
SCEF didn't have any money and was a voice crying in the wilderness
and Jim was the only star person they had. There was a board
meeting. There was a resistance to us really to the white citizens
council and a lot of things in this kind of network. It really was
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an interracial organization . But mainly trying to get whites to
speak out. Do you want to interrupt?
ANDREW MANIS: Yes, I do. As you're doing this, go ahead and give
me some of your perspective, the background of the Southern
Conference Education Fund, SCEF, its purpose and the organization
they had.
ANNE BRADEN: Okay. Before I get back to that, let me try to
briefly summarize it because that's a history I'm going to write
someday. There are a lot of people writing about it but I don't
trust them. About 1957, SCEF descended from the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare, which you are probably familiar with,
which was formed in 1938 in Birmingham . And we're going to have
next fall the organization I work with now which has descended from
all this (we should have done it this year but nobody had time)
our fiftieth anniversary thing . We decided we just couldn't do it
with Jesse Jackson running for president. We decided somebody has
got to do a fiftieth anniversary. Fred was in a meeting.
Actually, we planned this last month . So we thought of a way we
could do it in 1989 instead of 1988, which was to talk about
starting the second half of the century, looking forward to the
future instead of looking at the past. Lately we have been having
all these anniversaries and this, that and the other. But here
we've got fifty years. But the Southern Conference, which I was
not a part of, because that was before my day . I was a child. I'm
64 years old and I was a child in the thirties. But I know I am
oversimplifying this. There haven't been too many books written,
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you may have read Promises to Keep. Do you know about it?
ANDREW MANIS: No.
ANNE BRADEN: I l oaned my copy to somebody. It was written by a
guy -- I think his name was vanderbilt . It's the only book really
that has been written about the Southern Conference. It is worth
reading. I can tell you the weaknesses of it. It was written in
the 1950s. So, it has a 1950s perspective and I haven't read it in
a long time. There are some scholarly people who write books that
are doing some -- there's a woman in North Carolina who has done
research on the Southern Conference.
ANDREW MANIS: Linda Reed?
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, you know her. And then there is a guy named
Klibaner, who is from Wisconsin, who did a paper on SCEF, it was
his thesis. The Southern Conference has been partially covered in
other books but I don't know if very adequately. Turning to some
of the more traditional histories, its just like SCEF, its being
cut out of history, just like they tried to t ell me it didn't exist
then. Promises to Keep is worth reading. I said at first it was
written in the 1950s -- it's the Southern Conference in retrospect
later, fairly accurate. It was very much read and called a
communist front and so forth. This guy who wrote Promises t o Keep,
its from a poem about "I have many miles t o go and promises to
keep" was very friendly toward communism -- it was a friendly book
but it was almost like he was sitting there writing the book and
agreeing that the Southern Conference was in the communist front
which might have been relevant in the fifties when he wrote the
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book but was not relevant in the forties when the Southern
Confer ence emerged. I mean nobody gave a damn. So when you read
the book it was almost like it was the wrong emphasis, that he was
writing about the thirties from the viewpoint of the fifties which
were very different periods of history. But it's worth r eading.
Anyway, it was formed in 1938 in Birmingham, at a big conference,
and the proceedings were published at some libraries, etc . People
came from allover the South. It was formed really as different
strands that came together. One of the strands was the New Deal.
That strand was that Roosevelt was being riddled by the southern
congressmen . He had made a speech in Milledgeville, Georgia, the
year before calling on southerners to rise up and make their
congressmen do something about the blocking of his reform program.
He appointed a commission, or a committee or something, to study
the South and came out with this major report, "The South -- the
Nation's No. One Economic Problem" and a bunch of people wrote that
report and it was highly publicized . At the same time the CIO was
organized and later organized. Blacks were beginning to organize .
But people forget that there was a major force in the thirties and
I think the major of motive force. Coming out of the repression of
the last fifty years after reconstruction. Came out underneath the
Scottsboro Case, if you've read any of Hosea Hudson's stuff, the
miners organized in Birmingham. It was the black miners first that
organized. So with all that stirring going on and there was a guy
named Joe Gelders who grew up in Birmingham. I've always been
fascinated by him. Nobody ever has -- he seemed to come from a
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very prominent Jewish family in Birmingham who was highly respected
as native Jews were in Alabama. I grew up with this. There was a
difference in Alabama Jewish folk and New York Jews with whom I am
associated. He had this dramatic turnaround during the depression
which a lot of people did. They couldn't understand why people
were hungry when there was too much but they understood why people
were hungry when there wasn't enough, but when there was too much.
And he was probably a communist . I really don't know and most of
the people I talk to don't know. But very active in the
Scottsboro case and things. He got ambushed on the streets of
Birmingham one night and dragged off and left for dead by these
hoodlums. But he wasn't dead and he called somewhere and got some
help and he lived. But he died prematurely in 1950 as a result of
those internal injuries, although he was active after that. Very
dramatic because of the hearings of the Lafollette committee that
was investigating labor, I went to a library and looked up those
Lafollette hearings. The testimony comes out where the people who
ambushed him on the streets of Birmingham were agents of the
Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Anyway Joe Gelders was apparently
a very outstanding person and Jim Dombrowski learned more about him
and talked about him. But he was so aware of all this. So he went
up to Hyde Park to see Mrs. Roosevelt and to tell her what was
happening and would you support this and she said she would. He
was the main organizer really and worked himself to death getting
that conference together apparently and I don't think he came
because he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So it was the
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corning together of a lot of different times and was a real mixture
of people and, of course, later, but this was really after World
War II, when the House unamerican Committee issued a major report.
The first major report it ever issued was on the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare, which really wasn't what destroyed the
Southern Conference but was an attack on it. I asked Jim
Dombrowski one time, of course their thing was that, you know, this
was all organized by communists and then there was -- it was such
a vicious report there was a guy named Gearhorn, a law
professor, who did a report on the report. He studied the report
and all the things that were wrong with it. He said there were
five communists there. I think there were more than that. But I
asked him one day, because he was a part of all this. I said,
"Jim, did the communists organize the Southern Conference?" He
said, "Nobody organized the Southern Conference. Joe Gelders did a
lot of work but you just don't understand. Things were so bad
then, people were hungry. They didn't have any jobs. All they had
to do was put a notice in the paper that something was going to
happen and people came." I think this was true. It suggested
that's sort of the way things were in those days. So out of that
they formed the Southern Conference and in it was a multi-issue.
It was a New Deal program basically. It was certainly no
revolutionary organization, it was formed supporting the New Deal
program and it was for economic purposes. I think it was what we
are talking about now in the Jesse Jackson rainbow movement -- it
was just fifty years ahead of its time. I think that's a whole lot
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of -- but the deal was not formed as a civil rights group or to
deal with the issue of segregation initially. But what's always
interested me about it, because in my perspective, you can't deal
with any of these things without dealing with racism, but people
came there to try to deal with the economic problems in the South
and they ran right into the issue of racism. Because, as you have
probably heard this story, Bull Connor was Police Commissioner
then. He was out for a while and came back by the time all the
stuff was happening in the fifties and sixties . He was Police
Commissioner when I was a reporter there in the late forties. And
as Police Commissioner he issued a decree that blacks and whites
couldn ' t sit together and that is when he made a statement, and I
saw the notice , that as long as he was Police Commissioner of
Birmingham the "niggers and whites weren't going to segregate
together. " So that was when Mrs. Roosevelt moved her chair to the
middle of the aisle to protest that decree. My interpretation of
that is "Okay, we need to talk about jobs, labor organizing, farm
problems and all that but they got to deal with segregation before
they can deal with these. " So there became a civil rights
organization and took on the whole issue of voting rights and some
of the early suits on t he white primary that they were involved,
and then they set up this battle against the poll tax and then
initiated the campaign to eliminate the poll tax and a coalition
called the "National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, " which
eventually became bigger than the Southern Conference itself and
sort of spearheaded the voting rights movement and other things
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related to the civil rights issue . For ten years, 1938 to 1948,
when the Southern Conference met and voted itself out of existence
which was just recognizing the fact that it happened . They had
carried on the poll tax campaign and a whole bunch of other things
around issues of economic justice as well as voting rights and
civil rights. It became a pretty powerful force. There were
membership organizations. They grew during World War II. After
the war and you've read the Patriot during that period, I was
always fascinated by it. Each month in the Patriot they would have
reports on how many members they had gotten. They were growing
very rapidly in 1945 and 1946. They set up state affiliates. They
had the Committee for North Carolina, the Committee for Georgia,
the Committee for Alabama. And then some way within two or three
weeks, it collapsed like a house of cards. People had different
theories about why . That was the beginning of the Cold War and
domestically a lot of progressive organizations collapsed and this
was obviously the organization of the South that the witch-hunters
were after. That wasn't the whole story though. Jim Dombrowski
always said that's not what destroyed them -- the outside attack.
He said it was fiscal irresponsibility. Jim became very
conservative financially and when I was working with SCEF he would
never let us spend a nickel we didn ' t have to or borrow any money.
He said they really could have survived the outside attack but they
expanded so fast and there were other people on the staff and they
couldn't pay the people they had and eventually the people had to
leave and do something else and it just fell apart. I think that's
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only part of the story, too. The other thing is, what happened
was, that in 1948, Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party came
along . A lot of people connected with the Southern Conference -not
all of them, went heart and soul for that . Clark Foremen wrote
a pamphlet "Ten Years of Hope" about the history of the Southern
Conference. His theory was that their whole objective had been to
work for a political shift, a shift in the political power in the
South and here they saw the Wallace movement as a third party
movement was going to bring a change, which it did start out with
that premise, forty years ahead of its time. A lot of people who
had put their energy into the Southern Conference went into the
Wallace campaign. When that collapsed they never were able to
regroup as a nonpolitical organization . Meantime, the Southern
Conference Educational Fund had started as a purely paper wing of
the Southern Conference as a tax exempt thing. A lot of
organizations still do have sort of a tax exempt thing as an
educational part but it wasnlt really that separate as I understand
it. But after the Southern Conference collapsed or was in the
process of collapsing SCEF was still there. There was a whole
internal thing, too, between Dombrowski and Clark Foreman, and they
tried to kick Jim over to SCEF which I donlt think is important in
terms of the long range political trends . And then what Jim always
told me was that things are in sort of disarray and in 1948 or
somewhere along in there -- he loved to fish -- he was living in
New Orleans by then because the Southern Conference would meet
every two years and it set up its office wherever it met. They
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were in Nashville, then Chattanooga, then moved to New Orleans.
They had had the third such conference in New Orleans. So he went
fishing one weekend on the Gulf to just get away and think about
what had to be done now and decided that the main thing that all
these issues that the Southern Conference had dealt with were
obviously important, but that none of them could be dealt with or
even scratch the surface until segregation was destroyed and that
was the main issue -- racial segregation -- and that what it needed
was an organization with a single purpose -- to destroy segregation
in the South and to bring blacks and whites together on the theory
that it was just as much in the interest of whites as blacks. He
reorganized SCEF basically with that single point program -- to
destroy segregation -- and he pulled together at least nine or ten
people to do that -- black and white. That was before I was
associated with SCEF, too, but in that period from about 1948 to
1954, they would have conferences on desegregation and higher
education. And they carried on a big campaign about discrimination
in the hospitals. In fact that is where I first got in touch with
SCEF was in a fight against hospital discrimination. Not
segregation because they wouldn't even let blacks into the
hospital.
ANDREW MANIS: You and your husband?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, we were working here in the late forties and
early fifties. There was a situation here where three men died on
a hospital floor in Breckenridge County (Kentucky) and other things
like that. It really upset people so there was a thing formed
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called the UInterracial Hospital movement. II We learned some
things, too. We had written into state law that a hospital
couldn't refuse anybody in emergency care anyway . But I think it
was in that period that Jim heard about that some way and got in
touch with us. That's the first time I heard about SCEF. Then
there was a guy who worked on the newspaper here with SCEF. But
that was sort of a thing they would do, too. They had people like
us. At that time we were just working here locally trying to deal
with an issue on SCEF or get in touch with them to link them up
with other things that were going on and they had a southwide
campaign going on in hospitals discrimination and other aspects of
segregation that they were trying to deal with, mainly from an
information and educational point of view. Some legislative sort
of things, some court cases, but mainly just getting information to
people, but mainly trying to lift up the vision of what the society
could be like if they didn't have to deal with segregation, through
various publications and conferences and things like that. When
SCEF began to grow, the board was fairly small in the beginning,
and Senator Eastland who headed the Internal Subcommittee which was
sort of a Senate parallel of the House Unamerican Activities
Committee, went to New Orleans and had this big hearing in March
1954 on SCEF. They subpoenaed Jim and Aubrey and a whole bunch of
people and made their attack on SCEF, mainly based on the old
Southern Conference. I used to say these committees scratched each
others backs. They had the initial report of the House Unamerican
Activities Committee about the Southern Conference being a
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Communist front or the main vehicle of Communism in the south or
something . Then Eastland would quote that as an authority, that
SCEF was descended from the Southern Conference. And then the
Florida Unamerican Committee would quote that and then he would
issue a report. And the HUAC would pick up the Florida Committee
and quote it. They scratched each others backs for two decades .
Jim's response then to the Eastland attack was to write a whole
bunch of people around the South and said in effect "Senator
Eastland has attacked us . Wouldn ' t you like to spit in Senator
Eastland's eye by joining the SCEF Board." He didn't put it that
way but that was basically it. And the people did. And the board
sort of quadrupled its size overnight. And at that time -- it was
at that point where it was a political act to join SCEF, the SCEF
Board . We began, my husband and I got much closer to it during our
fight, which I am not going to go into now, but I'm sure you have
heard about the House situation and stuff like that. But t hey were
very supportive of us in that when we were charged with sedition,
and so we began to be in close touch with them and then they were
trying to figure some way, because it was the only voice really
that was Southern Regional Council, was the only other
interracial organization in the South and they were doing some good
work. I got respect for what they were doing except they were redbaiting
us allover the place and I don't think that's anything to
respect, but they were forming these councils on human relations,
but we were more action oriented . But, you know we're all voices
crying in the wilderness . And SCEF needed somebody -- well, Jim
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was trying to do what he could for the organization. He needed
somebody to travel around and we wanted -- I guess we had come out
of that case here . We had wanted to do more than we had before and
we were willing t o work for nothing, really. And so we went to
work as field secretaries for SCEF in 1957. That is when we went
to Birmingham where we met Fred. We had gone down there, but while
we were there -- and we talked about this -- Jim had -- I think
that is the first time he had tried to contact Fred. Fred's church
had been bombed back in December 1956 which would have been about
six months before that. And the Alabama Christian movement had
been formed and Jim would do that. He would just get in touch with
people who were struggling and offer whatever s upport. He had no
financial support and had no political clout, but any sort of
support was welcomed in a way at that time except people who were
afraid. And often people were afraid. I remember even to be
associated I remember sitting at breakfast or something with
Aubrey and Jim. And Jim had tried to call him and he had t o call
him back. Aubrey was holding his head kind of disgusted like Fred
was afraid to associate with SCEF. But obviously it wasn't so,
because Fred was busy or something. But, while we were there, we
did talk t o him and he asked us to come over to the Gaston Motel,
which you know about. I think it's still there. Somebody, C. T.
Vivian, was talking about that lately. No, Jack Odell was talking
about Paschal's in Atlanta, used to be the one place you could have
an interracial meeting. It was in the black community. It's still
a really good motel. A lot of people still go there. I do when I
20
go to Atlanta. That was the only place t hat there was any hope of
anything interracial . Even that was against the law -- to meet.
It was illegal for blacks and whites to meet . But they did it
anyway. So Fred was staying at the Gaston, because his house had
been bombed as well as the church and they were sort of rebuilding
the house or building another one across the street. But he was
living there at the Gaston. So he told us to come down there at
the Gaston Motel. So we went down t here and met him . I don't
remember too much about the conversation but he said he wanted to
show us the church and the house. So we went out and got a cab,
and were riding along, and Fred said, lIyou know we're breaking the
law? II riding in the cab, because it was illegal to ride
(integrated). So we went out there and he showed us -- they were
in the process of rebuilding the c hurch and the house. We just
talked some and I guess that Jim asked him to join the board of
SCEF and he did. Sometime during that period he began coming to
SCEF meetings. And you know, we had known him in a way a lot
better than other people that we were working with in the same way.
It was just that there was so much -- Birmingham was so impossible.
And, you know, just like a stone wall there , we began to try to get
the word out to people around the country what was happening in
Birmingham . That was one thing we could do something on. Of
course, Fred , instead of talking about this and looking back on it ,
he credits SCEF for saving his life sometimes because we were able
to get the word out. He would call and couldn't get pUblicity
there. The only way he could get the press to cover anythi ng would
21
be to get some paper in Pennsylvania or Louisville to call the
Associated Press and request a story from Birmingham. That was
done all the time when they were ignoring things in the South . It
wasn't that unusual, it was the way we operated. Then we would put
out a lot of news releases on things that were happening
everywhere, not just Birmingham. And of course they were ignored
by the big press but over a period of time there were things in the
black press, the small press, the student press, and some of the
church publications and you know, a few months later finally there
would be a story in the New York Times . We really worked at that
sort of thing because part of the job then was to get some sort of
attention from the country on what was happening in these places.
And we put out a major pamphlet.
ANDREW MANIS: "People in Motion?"
ANNE BRADEN: No, no, that was later. That was on the history. We
did that in about 1966 .
ANDREW MANIS: "They Strike Segregation at its Core?"
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, the little four page folder, where we called it
the "Johannesburg of North America." That was the first time ever
it was labeled that way, I think . And I donlt even know whether I
got a copy of that. I'm sure there must be one in Wisconsin where
all my stuff is. But we circulated that around the country. So we
were trying to publicize what was happening in Birmingham, partly
as protection. The news is the only protection we had.
would work with him on things like that.
So we
ANDREW MANIS: What were your first impressions of him when you saw
22
the house?
ANNE BRADEN: I don't think I had that hero image that I have now
until I knew him in his historic role. I'm not sure I realized then
how historic what he was doing was . He wasn't the only person.
You had people like that allover the South. People were standing
up allover, so in that sense, he didn't seem so unusual. But I've
always felt real at home with Fred from the beginning. I've always
felt a sort of kindred sort of spirit with Fred. To me he just --
aside from anything political or anything else he's just an easy
person to talk with and be around and I just felt that he's fun.
And a warm person you just feel like you've known him always. Or
I felt that way. I grew up sixty miles from him in Anniston, but
our paths never crossed and never would have except for the civil
rights movement. There was just sort of a kinship. Fred and I
have different prospecti ves on a lot of things, particularly
religion. So it was more like finding this kindred spirit. I
didn't particularly feel any sort of hero thing about him at that
time. But I'm trying to think of a couple of little things that
might interest you.
board meetings.
He got pretty regular at coming to the SCEF
ANDREW MANIS:
that you have.
ANNE BRADEN:
I'll interrupt you and ask you for any anecdotes
There is one that he had totally forgotten.
Birmingham was really scared. People were literally afraid to go
to Birmingham. He let me come down and speak. I almost forgotten
when that was. He had me come to speak to the Alabama Christian
23
movement. I had only met him Monday night. Has he told you about
that? I've heard him tell that story about how he kissed me and
wanted Bull Connor to know he was kissin' a white woman. I can 't
remember that. I have the vaguest memory of it.
ANDREW MANIS: He made a big point to do that for the detectives?
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, but it must have been a regular Monday night
meeting. But the thing I remember that he had forgotten. By this
time it was early sixties and we were in close touch with him
during the late fifties. SCEF had a big conference in Washington
about voting rights. That was one of the things that SCLC had a
big debate about whether to cosponsor. But they ended up doing it.
He was involved in that. But this was wait a minute, l'm
thinking here. The big demonstrations were in 1963. We had a
conference . .
ANDREW MANIS: Freedom rides were in 1961.
ANNE BRADEN: Oh , yeah. I know that. But we had a conference. I
could check the dates in the Patriot. A major conference in 1961
-- it must have been in the spring of 1962. Anyway I have this
vivid memory in my mind of a SCEF board meeting and we were in
Nashville. We were talking about -- and it was always kind of a
major thing, the SCEF board met twice a year. And those meetings
themselves were important because, as I say, it took some courage
to associate with SCEF, so wherever we met, sometimes we would have
some kind of public event . We wouldn I t always, but just an
opportunity to invite people to the meetings and we were trying to
decide where to have the next meeting. Fred was there. He spoke
24
up first and said "Why don't you all corne to Birmingham?" There
was dead silence. Everybody sort of -- finally somebody said
"Well, you know, we haven't met in Atlanta for some time and I
think it might be fine if we have a meeting in Atlanta." Fred was
sort of looking around and somebody said, "Well, another place that
we could go, why don't we meet in New Orleans? " Fred looked
around. All of a sudden he said, "I think ya'll are scared to corne
to Birmingham." (Anne Braden laughs.) I mean, you did not have
interracial meetings in Birmingham. That's all there was to it.
Bull Connor had said that he would arrest anybody in an int erracial
meeting in Birmingham. And he had some people. That's why I can 't
remember when I spoke in that meeting, whether it was before or
after that. But you just didn't. People were scared. He was
right. But nobody wanted to be called a coward, see, so when he
said that everybody started to say we had to go to Birmingham. I
could have two things confused here but I think then that was when
we decided to have the meeting in Birmingham. I remember Herman
Long. Herman was a great person. He ran the race relations
institute and he is vice chair of SCEF. I remember Herman said,
"Fred, where in the world how are you going to deal with this in
Birmingham? Where we gonna sleep? Where we gonna eat?" "Don't
worry about that. Ya'll corne to Birmingham, unless you're scared
to come to Birmingham." So I think that those two things coincided
but I know that we decided to have this conference in connection
with our meeting. The meeting would be one day and the conference
the next or something like that. On "How to Integrate the Deep
25
South," that was the topic of it. That is what we talked about.
There is a brochure somewhere, which indicates that. But it was
waving a red flag. We did. And, let's see, the meetings -- we
stayed at the Gaston . We couldn't stay anyplace but the Gaston.
We weren't even supposed to stay there, if you were whites, you
know, but we did. Other people did too, as time went on, during
the demonstrations, white people did stay at the Gast on . But that
was against the law, too, but there wasn't any other place to stay
so we stayed at the Gaston. Maybe Gaston's building which is near
there. But I will never forget that day we got there. We didn't
know what was going to happen because nobody had had any racial
conference in Birmingham maybe since the Southern Conference -founding
conference. I don't know. Probably in the forties, but
not in the late forties or fifties. People just didn't do that.
The very fact that it was held was precedent-breaking. A lot of
people came because the SNCC people a lot of the people in SNCC
were pretty close to the SCEF people. It turned out to be a very
successful meeting in terms of, not only what was discussed, but in
breaking that pattern that whites and blacks could meet in
Birmingham together. But we got to Birmingham and went t o the
Gaston Motel t o eat lunch. Several of us. I remember Fred walked
in "Oh, I'm glad to see everybody . I'm glad you're here and glad
you're not scared to come to Birmingham." (Anne Braden laughs.)
I remember I said, "Fred, we're scared to death, but we 're here."
It was successful and nobody got arrested. I think that was the
spring of 1962 and it was when it was -- I'll tell you what it was.
26
No, let's see, when was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church,
1962 or 1963?
ANDREW MANIS: 1963.
ANNE BRADEN: After the demonstrations. The big demonstrations
were in the spring of 1963 -- so 1962 is when it was. And then
SCLC had its annual convention in Birmingham the following August
which was also a major event but was after the SCEF thing. But we
never would have gone if he hadn't said "I believe you all are
scared to come to Birmingham."
ANDREW MANIS: Did he have any other significant role in the
conference? Do you r emember a speech he may have made?
ANNE BRADEN: Oh, I'm sure he did. I believe he presided. As I
recall he did. The board met that Friday for a business meeting at
a church -- not Sixteenth Street but another church about a block
away, St. Paul's maybe. That night we had a mass rally -- a public
rally. I can't remember the church, maybe St. Paul's Methodist.
And we had I remember Howard Schomer. He is still living. He was
President of Chicago Theological Seminary. He was kind of a
figure. He came and spoke as sort of a drawing card to people.
We've always had a big mass meeting in Birmingham and I guess this
one was a little scary . Fred presided. He was generally the
leader of the thing. Then there were workshops the next day. He
was visibly the l eader of the whole thing. Apparently, the police
just decided not to take it on, partly because there were so many
people from out of town and it would have caused a problem if they
had tried to arrest all those people. I think it also had an
27
impact on the atmosphere just that you could have that kind of
meeting down there. Then the SCLC convention was in the next few
months. It was after that, that they began building up to the
demonstrations that happened in the spring of 1963. By which time
as you know, Fred had moved from Birmingham. I don't know what he
has told you about it or his decision to move.
ANDREW MANIS: We talked about it today. He went into some detail
about that.
ANNE BRADEN: I don't know how it looks to him now. You know when
he was talking about going, what he said to me was, and I can't
remember now when it was, was it in 1961 or 1962.
ANDREW MANIS: August 1961.
ANNE BRADEN: Of 1961? So that conference we had in 1962 was after
he had moved away from there. But, see, at that point you wouldn't
have known because he was back all the time practically. He was
back every week for the mass meetings. But I know when he decided
to move, you say it was in 1961. That was when Carl was imprisoned
on the HUAC case. I remember sitting around here talking about it.
I was concerned he was leaving. You don't want anybody to leave
somewhere . What he said to me at that time was, he said, and this
is ironic I guess in a way, he said "if I could see any possibility
of anything ever changing in Birmingham, I'd stay, but I don't. I
just don't know how much longer I should put my family through
this. " That's what he said to me. Now I don't know what he is
saying in retrospect.
ANDREW MANIS: Would you consider that a low moment for him? He
28
always came across as so certain and courageous.
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, I think he was discouraged . of course, he
never quit fighting . He kept going back . He continued , I think,
until I don't know how long, as president of the Alabama Christian
movement for some years after that. The movement couldn ' t survive
without him. It was a one man movement --a one man leadership. He
was more worried about his family than himself obviously . Once his
family was out, he was down there most of the time. Apparently,
originally it worked out with that church in Cincinnati. They
agreed to him being gone all the time because they -- of course
later, some of them got kind of testy about it I guess, but in that
period they were proud I guess to have a big civil rights leader
there. But see, he was gone all the time. But it was more his
family -- I mean, the kind of strain they were under for years,
which I think is one of the reasons Ruby died young, course I don't
know the whole story. But she was under terrible strain and the
kids were, too, I mean, it was just constant. It wasn't just one
incident here and there. It was a constant threats they lived
with. And like anybody in that situation, they, not for
themselves, but there is always a guilty feeling about your family.
So I think at that point he said to me that it didn't look like
Birmingham would ever change.
ANDREW MANIS: Very quickly after that, he hit on the idea of SCLC
coming there and doing direct action .
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, they were already involved in some direct
action with SCLC, to focus national attention on it is what the
29
SCLC did.
ANDREW MANIS: From everything I can tell, it was Shuttlesworth's -it
was essentially Fred's idea.
ANNE BRADEN: That they come.
ANDREW MANIS: Even insistence that Martin
ANNE BRADEN: Oh, there's no doubt about that. I think that's
true. I don't think there is anything in King's records that would
contradict that but I've always -- that was always my understanding
of it and I've never seen anything to contradict that. See,
everybody wanted Martin to come. Martin and that was an
unhealthy thing, but it just happened, just like everybody wants
Jesse Jackson now. I guess people need a charismatic leader or
something. But Martin -- there was a terrible strain on him.
People were thinking that if Martin Luther King would come that we
could do all these things. This was people who weren't just
sitting there doing nothing. They were trying to organize, but if
Martin came it was part of it. Not only that, but we'll get
national attention. Maybe more than that. So Birmingham was just
one of many places who wanted Martin Luther King to come. And of
course the students didn't want him to come half the time, the
people in SNCC, but a lot of the local people did. Because it
would focus attention, so that it wasn't unusual or strange that
Fred would think nWhy not Birmingham?" A lot of us, including
Fred, had always had the sense, and it's in that little brochure
"Segregation at Its Core" or whatever it was. Birmingham was sort
of the epitome of the south. If you could crack Birmingham, you
30
could crack the whole south, which I think is the way it worked out
really. Once you did, everything else began to trouble. Really it
~ the key. It was so rigid there and so violent. See,
Birmingham had such a .
ANDREW MANIS: Was that a common perception? Occasionally it
sounds like Shuttlesworth was the first one to figure out that if
you could crack it in Birmingham it would fall apart every place
else.
ANNE BRADEN: Well, we said that a lot and we talked about it at
SCEF about it. It was sort of a collective thing there among Fred
and all of us. Well, I think there was a general feeling that
there are certain places that have symbolic meanings. Mississippi
had that in peoplels minds that way, which was true, too, if you
could crack Mississippi, you could crack any where. For a while,
you know, until the late fifties, people thought Mississippi was
impossible until the early sixties when Bob Moses and some people
began working there, that it was just impossible. So Mississippi,
in a different way, because that was a whole state -- I think there
was a common perception. I don't think it was articulated that
much as what we've said now "that if we could crack Birmingham, we
could crack the whole thing" but everybody or a lot of people
thought of Birmingham as the epitome of racist terror, partly
because of what Fred had been doing and the bombings and all that
and, of course, they tried to start a boycott there. It was a bus
boycott after Montgomery. It never quite came off -- it was just
too big a city to do what you did in Montgomery. But there were
31
all these other things going on that did not start when King came .
The Alabama Christian movement was a real viable organization and
probably the most mass organization that SCLC worked with any
placet indigenous. Not something that just happened when King
went, but you know those Monday night meetings went on long before
King came and masses of people came out and raised money. All of
the money that they spent on court cases -- of course the NAACP
the Legal Fund -- came in and did those things. But they raised
the money at the grass roots.
ANDREW MANIS: Tell me about some of those mass meetings that you
attended if you can sort of narrate what it was like. I've read
the detectives' reports but I'm not completely sure what you have
in mind when you talk about differences on issues like religion
with people like Fred.
what was going on.
So, I'm interested in how you perceived
ANNE BRADEN: Well, my definition, to answer that question first --
I had a conversation with Fred once , and I've thought about it a
lot. We were sitting out here at the airport. I guess I was
taking him to a plane or something. I just remember where we were.
The place isn't important. We had a little time. You rarely had
time to talk philosophic in those days. We got to talking about
the bombing at his house.
ANDREW MANIS: Was this in the sixties?
ANNE BRADEN: It was in the sixties. It was some years after the
bombing. I said, n Fred " And, you see, he always presented
this thing -- he still does. He's gotten it down -- he's told the
32
story so many times. But he always presented it that way, "when
the bomb went off and he was in the bed" and he said the bedpost
went through the wall sort of like that and the impact was so
great and they never found the springs to the bed and he didn't get
a scratch . He always felt that God saved him to lead the people of
Birmingham to freedom. So, we were just sitting there" talking one
day and I said "Fred, I consider myself a religious person but I
have worked out what I believe and we are going in the same
direction, we just believe different things." I said, "I believe
in God, if you can call it God, but is a different concept of God
from what you believe. I don't believe, I guess I conceive as God
as a force in the universe which is the universe and that my
relationship to this as an individual is that I need to get in tune
with that force in the universe but I don't conceive of a God that
reaches out and changes the course of what human beings are doing.
Human beings make a war. I don't think God is going to reach out
and say, save my son or save me. I don't think of God as that sort
of a concept." He sat there listening. He listens to what you
say . He is sharp as he can be. So I said, "It's just beyond my
ken, sort of, I don't conceive of a God that reaches out and saves
you and the house and the bed. People did that horrible thing and
that's just not the kind of God I conceive of." He sat there and
listened and then he said, "Well, how do you explain it?"
(Laughs . ) I didn't have the answer. So that's the only difference
I had with him. No, I think the power of the religious belief is
that, was the motor force of that movement. The mass meetings
33
I didn't go to a lot of them, but there was a cornmon denominator
where -- the difference about Birmingham was they were so regular.
People just came out for years every Monday night. I think the
music was a big part of it and there was always preaching but it
wasn't like Sunday morning preaching -- not like some Sunday
morning preaching because it wasn't just generalities that didn 't
mean anything. People were talking about real things, but it was
the same sort of spiritual kind of force and the people really did
feel that they not only were inspired to action but felt like they
were part of a historic movement that was God's will. There's a
really great speech that I had on tape somewhere that Andy Young
made. And Andy and I don't agree on everything, but he made some
good speeches. And this was a speech he made at the 25th
anniversary of the SCLC. It was in Birmingham -- it must have been
the 20th -- 77 -- the 20th then, anniversary celebration. I taped
his speech and I transcribed it and because he was the main speaker
at the dinner, and because he was in Birmingham, he was talking
about the Birmingham movement, but it's a great description of
and he is a very eloquent sort of speaker -- of that movement. I
thought it was better than -- the way he described it -- if I find
that tape 1111 lend it to you -- the way he described the climax of
how they won in 1963, you know, was much better than the thing on
"Eyes on the Prize." I thought that was the end of the Birmingham
episode but that was kind of anticlimactic. You didn't get that
feeling there that people had of victory which they did, you know.
It wasn't complete, but it sure was for the time being. But he
34
talks about the mass meetings, he talked actually, what's the guy's
name who is the musician in Birmingham, he's still there . He sings
and led the singing in those days. He s till comes and leads the
s inging .
ANDREW MANIS: Carlton Reece?
ANNE BRADEN: Carlton Reece. Have you heard him?
ANDREW MANIS: He will be at Fred's church next week.
ANNE BRADEN: He ' s great . I never heard him anyplace but
Birmingham so I don ' t know how he'd sound, but he's just great.
But Andy said -- he was talking about how Birmingham changed the
course of history but he said that - - well, he started out talking
about Carlton Reece and he said "You know, we have these meetings
and Fred would get up and preach and Martin would get up and
preach . They didn't let me preach in those days " because he was
such a young minister. But he said, "They would preach the wall
down and the n they would issue the call for people that wanted to
go to jail the next day. Nobody wanted to go to jail. People
forget, people weren ' t anxious to go to jail. Sometimes the kids
were but nobody would respond . But then Carlton Reece would begin
to play and it was like we were lifted up and people would corne
f orth and volunteer to go to jail the next day." Then he described
the day that -- this is what I remember what he said --I think it
was Easter Sunday . It was the day that the people marched and they
turned the fire hose on them. Andy telling about it describes that
-- he said that "That Sunday they were going t o march down to the
jail because the young people were already in jail" and he said --
35
they were trying to get people out of churches to march down there
and finally people would come out and then they put the fire hose
to us -- he was scared because he said "I knew what those fire
hoses could do. II And he said lithe other thing was that was not our
usual marching crowd." He said, "Those people were dressed up in
their Sunday go to meeting clothes and they didn't want to get all
those clothes wet with the fire hoses." He said, "I was Tomin'."
This was twenty years later. And so, you know "Please, Mr. Mayor,
we're just going to march down there. We're coming right back.
We're just going to the jail and we're coming right back." And
then he said, and so they knelt down to pray, "and then this woman
got up and said 'God is with this movement -- we're going to the
jail. ' Everybody got up and marched toward the jail and they
pulled out the fire hoses and when we looked around there wasn 't
any water coming from the fire hoses. It was corning from the eyes
of those firemen." He said, "That was the moment I knew that
Birmingham had been going nonviolently to its knees and the people
of this county bowed in tribute to the great souls of this city and
we began to see the transformation of our nation." That I s Andy and
his flowery language. I saw Andy recently and I quoted him and he
said "Send me a copy of that." But it was much better than the way
it carne across on Eyes on the Prize. There was such a spirit and
people felt like they were doing God's will.
ANDREW MANIS: Tell me at what point you were with Shuttlesworth at
a significant place along the way, from the time you met him and
until 1968.
36
ANNE BRADEN: Well, it was in meetings and stuff. Now I wasn ' t
down there during the big demonstrations. See, I stayed away from
there deliberately . You got to understand. My name was such a
fire word . That wasn't going to happen at that point . I didn ' t go
to Mississippi for the summer of 1964 for the same reason. I wrote
an article about that for Southern Exposure a few years ago. Fred
never told me to stay out of Birmingham. Some of the SNCC people
said "you can help us most by staying away this summer." Looking
back on it, I guess you sort of red-bait yourself but I think that
was just ammunition in the hands of the enemy, so we helped in
other ways. But I'd see him at meetings and various SCEF things he
was at pretty constantly. I am certain he has told you about the
whole hassle with the NAACP and to a certain extent of the SCLC and
when he became president of SCEF . Has he told you that story?
ANDREW MANIS : No, he hasn't.
ANNE BRADEN: He enjoys telling it really, so you ought to hear his
version. He was very active on the SCEF Board and so in 1963,
Aubrey Williams had been president of SCEF for some years. Then he
retired and became President Emeritus and began to spend more of
his time at the National Committee to Abolish HUAC. So we elected
Bishop Love who was a black Methodist minister based up in
Maryland. He served a couple of years. I don't know what happened
to him. He stayed on the board but he didn't want to be president
any more . Anyway, in 1963, -- incidentally, you asked me about the
background of SCEF and I told you about how Jim figured out that
was the whole -- from 1948 to 1963 SCEF'S program was basically the
37
single point program of fighting segregation. We carne into it in
those early years, and it changed in 1963. We had a meeting which
Fred carne to. I think he was president by then. We elected Fred
as president in the spring of 1963. We met in Norfolk, Virginia
and had a board meeting there and elected officers and made him
president. 1111 corne back to the hassle later. It was soon after
that we met in New Orleans. Fred came. Jim was there and Carl and
me, which was (the) staff. Ella Baker who was working, that I s
another story, but she was working closely with SCEF. She resisted
that communist scare, too, but she was close to Fred. In fact when
I got to know Ella, well, I met her in Fred Shuttlesworth I s
kitchen. They called me one day. It was in 1958 or 1959, planning
the voter registration drive and she was very close to Fred. We
had a meeting and talked about what we would do in terms of our
program with SCEF at that point and realized it was our
assessment and I think history proved us right but we were entering
a new period of history. This was 1963. Segregation in public
accommodations, that battle was essentially won by then. It wasnlt
written into law until 1964. But it was won on the streets.
Things were breaking down. Voting rights were gonna be won. The
black movement was moving on to economic issues because things
began to get -- people were saying in Texas -- people were saying
the same thing in North Carolina rrWhat good is it to be able to sit
at the 1 unch counter when you don I t have enough money to buy a
hamburger? II People were saying these things and raising those
issues and people were forming the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union
38
in Mississippi and there was, you know, turning to economic issues.
So we decided that we were at a stage where we were clearing away
the debris and, you know, that we would begin to talk about basic
issues such as economic and social justice, which you had not been
able to do because it was a police state. We developed a ten-point
program with different issues that SCEF would work on which were
mostly related to economics and also to world peace. We got into
the whole peace and civil rights thing as the sixties went on in
the viet Nam war. But it was really a return to the Southern
Conference of Human Welfare because we had said that we were at a
different stage and as the sixties evolved, that's what SCEF was
doing more. Especially after SNCC told all the white people to go
organize, whites, a lot of them came to SCEF. We set up projects
to organize whites and blacks and Fred was president of SCEF during
that period.
ANDREW MANIS: Can you summarize basically what his responsibilities
were as president?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, he was a pretty active president and he stayed
in close touch with things. SCEF, like most organizations I guess,
well, certainly one that operates over a region, the staff day to
day ran the organization and we did the work and, see, Jim, well,
we didn't really have that much staff. We didn't have a lot of
money and we weren't that kind of organization. Most of the times
Carl and I were about the only staff -- it was Jim Dombrowski in
New Orleans and Carl and me here after we made a move to
Louisville, but we traveled throughout the South. Our job was
39
traveling, basically, from 1957 until 1966. We were field
secretaries so we were out allover the South and I was editing the
Southern Patriot. Ella came on part time on the staff. She came
to work with us. So she worked part time and John Saulter part
time. A white guy -- actually native American but he hadn't
claimed that heritage then. But that's all the staff we had. It
grew a lot in the late sixties. You had a board by then of about
maybe fifty people and an advisory committee which was really a way
to get people to lend their names. And then there were the
officers that we kept in real close touch with as different things
would come up. And Fred, we were always in real close touch with
something he needed to take a position on or something that needed
to be done. We were in constant touch with him but he didn't have
any day-to-day responsibilities. That was the staff. But he was
giving leadership in terms of direction and raising the right
questions. But when he was first elected in the spring of 1963 and
I was (unintelligible) then. And I didn't know some of this until
later. We knew he would be under attack. But the way he tells
this -- he'll tell you about it at some point later on . Actually
I think he was in Jackson, Mississippi, for something and he was
coming to Birmingham. Glouster Current, of the NAACP National
Office and Director of Branches and had been since the fifties, and
Glouster made it his business in life to make sure there were no
communists in the NAACP, but the NAACP had a rather ambiguous role
because they were seen as a much more conservative force than the
SCLC and SNCC and some of the action groups, but they were doing a
40
lot of legal work and they had been treated unfairly by history in
a way because of the places where the NAACP youth groups were
leading the sit-ins, the lines crossed, but they were handling a
lot of Fred's legal cases. Because there were many of them. I
remember doing news releases, but I'm terrible on remembering
figures and statistics but some ridiculous number of charges that
we had against him all at once plus all the cases he filed. They
were into court stuff a lot in Alabama. There was a mass movement,
but it was legal, too. They were always filing some kind of court
suit, but the NAACP was handling most of these for them. Roy
Wilkins was the Director of NAACP. So he was pretty dependent on
them for legal help because, of course, they were raising money all
the time at these mass meetings. There weren't that many lawyers
to hire in Birmingham. So they needed help. But, anyway, he was
in Jackson, and the way he tells the story, at Jackson they got on
the plane . I don't know whether he was with Glouster Current or if
they both happen to have got on the same plane. But in the Jackson
News they had a big banner headline "Negro Preacher Heads Communist
Front Group . n So Glouster Current said "What's gain' on?" "Well,"
(Fred) said, "I've been elected President of SCEF." "Oh, well, you
better get out of that." So Fred says when he got to Birmingham,
he and Glouster got off and said "We better talk to Roy." He
called up Roy Wilkins and told him about this article in the paper.
So then he said "Put Fred on the phone." So Fred got on the phone
and he says, "Yeah, I guess you've heard, I was elected president
of the Southern Conference and I've accepted. II And he said, "Now,
41
I understand maybe that may cause you some probl ems , and __ II Oh,
yeah, the way he starts off - - Fred - - when he tells the story
well, the first thing Fred said to ROy was "How's my neck? II So
whenever he talked to the NAACP, he always asked "How's my neck?"
So, he said, "Well, if you all feel like you can't represent me any
more, well, that's just -- I ' l l have to find some other legal help
or something. " Roy says, "Oh, no, no, no, Fred, don ' t worry about
that. Don't worry about t hat." They needed Fred worse t han he
needed them if you want to know the truth about it . So that
settled that and Glouster Current went on back to New York and
wasn ' t ever heard from any more on that question. But then the
other story he tells is that he was actually in Louisville . That
was a coincidence, but it was just where it happened. They went on
a tour . This was in 1963. He was elected president of SCEF and
that's when the big things were in Birmingham. Birmingham was big
news . After they sort of settled things in Birmingham there was a
big speaking tour and they carne. Martin, Fred, Ralph Abernathy,
Wyatt Walker -- and there was a big rally here and everywhere .
People were using t he Birmingham thing to stimulate t he local
movements. I did not know about this until years later that Fred
said that he was riding in -- I guess maybe they just met -- first
time he had seen Marti n -- I guess since he had been elected
president of SCEF because it just happened in May. But it was
after the big things in Birmingham. And then I think it was Fred
and Ralph in the car riding into town from the airport or
something. The way he tells the story -- the way I first heard him
42
tell it he has modified it from the first way he told it -- he
decided to tell about this because he knew he was going to be
making some problems. So, he says, "Martin, there's one thing I've
been wanting to tell you. I've been elected president of SCEF and
I've accepted. Now I understand that might cause some problems
wi th SCLC (because he was secretary of SCLC at that time) -- I
understand it might cause some problems for SCLC. If you think it
will do that, I'll resign from SCLC. That is how I heard him tell
the story. He changed ita little later. II No , no, that's all
right, we don't think you should resign.!! However, I think they
shut him out a lot after that.
reason. I think that for some
secretary of SCLC for a long time.
I don't know whether that's the
reason they did. He stayed
But even today, SCLC will have
a convention and they will play Fred up like a lot of other people
who are doing less today than Fred is. Something happened along in
there. I don't know that there's a connection. There wouldn't
have been on Martin's part because he had come through all that
with SCEF. And because he is long gone, and whether Dr. (Joseph)
Lowery, -- I don't know. There are other things I am sure he has
told you because he got in a terrible hassle with Martin at the end
of Birmingham.
ANDREW MANIS: Do you think it was that?
ANNE BRADEN: That hassle?
ANDREW MANIS: That particular exchange of words?
ANNE BRADEN: Oh, it's just hard to say. I don't -- Martin never
impressed me as one to hold a grudge.
43
ANDREW MANIS: Not Martin, per se, but some .
ANNE BRADEN: But some of the other people around him. Something!
Maybe they saw Fred as too uncontrollable, a maverick. He was, you
know, he wasn't one of these kind that you could tell him what to
do. At that point, the whole Birmingham struggle really built SCLC
up. SCLC had its ups and downs and they'd just had a real defeat
in Albany, Georgia, whether they called it that or not, it was. We
didn't call it that either in the Patriot at the time, but,
looking back on it, it was. They needed a victory and that sort of
thing and it was so that they certainly needed Fred, but it was
mutual. So I really don't know. I have never understood it.
ANDREW MANIS: You certainly -- you seem to anyway, unless you're
close enough as at some point or another, I will be, after I've
investigated all of this, close enough to see what local things he
has done in the Cincinnati area perhaps. It does seem as if he was
removed or was being no longer in the limelight significantly after
1963. Is that fair?
ANNE BRADEN: In the limelight where? Birmingham? Nationally?
SCLC? Or what?
ANDREW MANIS: Nationally. Well, just as you mentioned where, for
example, SCLC doesn't seem to give him as much attention as the
others you mentioned while ago. They give more attention to some
who haven't been doing as much as Fred has. Maybe you could
elaborate on that?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, I don't know. That is almost putting it more
extremely than is fair because some of those people -- we're
44
talking about today -- a lot of people think SCLC is dead, which it
really isn't. It's had a lot of life in the last decade and it
still does. It has put a lot of strength in Alabama and some other
places in the Deep South and still it has a tremendous amount of
prestige, I find, with grass roots people which is the same sort of
thing when people struggled for SCLC to come in. The name has
magic. It hasn't had much money for years. I am trying to look
back at when Fred didn't have prominence after 1963. It's hard to
know how much to attribute to the press . The press decides who
they are going to play up and, in a sense, course the press dropped
the civil rights movement back in the mid-sixties, too. They
didn't pay the same attention to it. So it is hard to pinpoint a
moment in time. I don't even remember when he quit being secretary
of SCLC. It's not any time like -- the convention. NOw, I don't
know if Fred was there this last time in Washington. They are
always having him to do something.
ANDREW MAN! S : Let me ask you, have you observed his personality
and his activism change over the years?
ANNE BRADEN: I haven't really seen any change.
ANDREW MANIS: ??
ANNE BRADEN: I would say it has. I've never been clear on exactly
what his role has been in Cincinnati because I don't spend any time
in Cincinnati, even though it is close. I know people there but
its just somewhere ?? ?? work. But I 1 know he has tried to be
active in a number of things there. He has told me about different
things how they had a thing about the utility rates. He spent
45
a lot of time building a church. Then there was a big split in the
church and he built another one. He built it with people, but
mainly, he built another church. He spent a lot of time on the
c hurch. But he has been involved in different things there . I
know some things that I have suggested people go to see him about.
He hasn't necessaril y responded to -- he has always opened up his
church for whatever is going on in the organized anti- Klan network
a nd the march at Greensboro . See, down through the years he has
still done what he did in the sixties. He will do things that
other people won ' t, like that Greensboro thing . Remember the
Greensboro massacre when they shot people down in the s t reets.
Some of us were from the anti- Klan Network which had just started,
which Fred hadn't been that much involved in. C. T. Vivian had
called the initial meeting to form that thing. Then when that
thing that happened in Greensboro -- the people were so afraid in
Greensboro . It was really ridiculous. So we were trying to find
a way to break through the fear. Dr. Lowery, I don ' t want to get
in a position of criticizing him, because I have a lot of r espect
for Dr . Lowery in recent years. He was having a time deciding
whether to get involved in the Greensboro thing. SCLC was sort of
"on- again off-again . " They finally did come into it. The coalition
had a big march of about 10,000 people on February 2, 1980 . But in
the Fall, or maybe it was in January because they put that march up
six weeks . But it was in the early stages and we were trying to
have a press conference in Greensboro with some sort of clout to
announce we were really going to do this and to really encourage
46
people who wanted to speak out but were scared. We, at that point,
did not have the SCLC firm. I remember I called Fred to see if he
would come. He came immediately and he knew his role right then.
I told him we were having trouble as to whether the SCLC was really
going to support it. He said, "Well, if I come, they'll have to.
They wouldn't want me to be out front without them. II So he came at
his own expense. There have been other instances like that down
through the years. When you needed somebody that would stick their
neck out -- like in the Eddie Carthon's case (tape interruption)
civil rights movement as far as the news media and mass media was
concerned after the mid-sixties. I had a whole theory about what
happened to the civil rights movement, which isn't about what you
are writing about so much, but it didn't just sort of dissipate.
There was a massive war against the movement in the late sixties.
A lot of people don't realize that, especially white people,
because it was mainly against blacks. It was just horrendous in
terms of people being put in jail by organizers. I was traveling
in the South. You couldn't go into any community where all black
I
organizers weren't either in jailor on the way or just out because
they raised a lot of hell. And so that was that. And then there
was the fact that it wasn't news any more or it was the kind of
news they didn't want to print and even in Birmingham, there were
continuing struggles there, especially around the police. That is
why Arrington got elected, but even before Arrington, and Fred was
involved in all that because he was coming back a lot during that
period. Various police brutality things going on, demonstrations,
47
in the late sixties, weren't covered in the press at all. I
remember when, though I do not remember who told me this, but
somebody who had talked to a reporter from one of the major papers
in Chicago, Sun Times, or one of the major papers, who was down
there and said that he had been told by his editor "unless 500
people are arrested or somebody is killed, don't even call us."
Now they had decided it wasn't news any more. And not only decided
it wasn 't news, I think that the media is part of the
Establishment, and they did do a lot to build up the movement, but
they were not going to continue to do it . They're not going to do
it for us now. So, my point is, it wasn't just Fred being
eclipsed. It was a general thing and a lot of people. You didn't
hear that much about Ralph Abernathy. You didn't hear that much
about C. T. Vivian for a long time. So, I don 't know whether there
is something different in Fred I s case. I think it's more the
question as to why he seemed to not have the prominence within SCLC
as time went on. I don't really know the answer to that. There
was a lot of struggle in SCLC about who was going to inherit the
mantle, and all that and then when Dr. Lowery became president he
did a lot to revitalize it .
ANDREW MANIS: Let me ask you to -- I'm the kind of person who
figures everybody's got an ego -- and, if you'd listen, depending
how you interpret what you hear while you talk to Shuttlesworth,
you hear him speak about his role in ways that sound egotistical -I
don't mean that in a judgmental way but just as a matter of fact.
Do you think he ever feels any sense --felt any sense of
48
competition with, o r feels any sense of jealousy, about the way the
country looks at King versus his own role. What kind of a
relationship did they have at the points that you were able to
observe them?
ANNE BRADEN: I 'm -- to get to your first question first, just in
talking with Fred, I've never particularly sensed that he was
jealous or felt that he should have been the great person instead
of King. I never felt that with him. In fact I don't think I felt
that with any of the people who were close to King. I don't know
why. Maybe it was there and I didn 't see it or they just covered
it up. I remember back in the earlier days Ralph Abernathy, I
remember talking to him at some point and a question came up that
he might be being neglected a little bit, but that was a long long
time ago and I never heard Fred ever intimate anything like that.
I think whatever ego needs Fred had, and everybody does have them,
and he does have a strong ego . I mean, you take, you know you
couldn 't buck the system. It took somebody like Fred. You got to
have a strong ego. In fact, people run around saying Jesse Jackson
is an egomaniac. Well, you're not going to run for president of
the United States unless you've got a strong ego, but they don't
say these other candidates are egomaniacs. So he did have that and
has it I guess, although I never got the feeling even after he
moved to Cincinnati because he's not the great hero that much any
more, that he felt like a has-been or -- I never got that feeling.
I mean, he's worked hard to build his church in Cincinnati, but has
gone back to Birmingham. So at one time he wasn't recognized in
49
Birmingham as much as he obviously should be with his role in
history and so forth, although everybody knew him. Any time he
went back a big crowd would come out to hear him but there wasn't
a lot of public recognition and the organization I work with now,
soc (Southern organizing Committee), really did the first thing to
recognize Fred publicly, and we wanted that to happen. It was our
idea. We decided that the Southern Organizing Committee for Social
Justice is a group a bunch of us founded after SCEF broke up in the
mid-seventies. Has its headquarters in Birmingham and is a
Southwide network now and Fred's been a part of it. He has been on
the board. We decided along in, I don't remember what year, it's
in a file upstairs, but it was in the latter part of the seventies
1977 or 1978 -- to have a big thing in Birmingham honoring Fred
because nobody had really done that up to that point. That was
what -- fifteen years after the climax of the movement, though, as
I said, he went back very regularly for those demonstrations in the
late sixties. But there had never been anything at that point.
Now that was probably ten years ago that we did that and at that
point, it was just fifteen years away from 1963, although, people
in a way, knew what Birmingham does for all the folks who come out
and stuff like that and just somebody that hadn't sort of written
any history of what he had really done. So we decided
(interference) and he had at this thing "An Evening Gathering in
Sixteenth Street Church -- A Tribute to Fred." We worked on it for
some months. We got together and made sure we covered all the
bases and had all the people there that were the various factions
50
of what happened. There was some jealousy of him there, I think.
We ran into that then. And when we were organizing that, I think
that maybe some of the people that were then in ostensibly the
Alabama Christian movement, which I don't think amounted to that
much any more but the name was there, but SCLC was a more viable
organization at that time. One of the people connected with that
didn't -- sort of dragged his heels, wasn't in particular favor of
us. But anyway we had Ossie Davis corne, you know, just sort of a
drawing card because we weren't sure what response we'd get. And
the other people -- we tried to get Coretta, but we couldn't
Coretta King, but Martin Luther King, III, came to speak. C. T.
Vivian. There was a big turnout. Somebody connected with SOC went
to the Birmingham City Council, and Arrington was on the city
council then (it was before he was elected mayor) and asked them to
declare the day "Fred Shuttlesworth Day." Arrington made a motion
and they agreed to do that. So it was quite successful. But that
was the first time that he was publicly honored in Birmingham.
Then within a year, one of the universities there had something,
some sort of a shindig or conference honoring him. Since then
there have been a series of things. Most recently they named a
street for him. But it took a while for that to happen, which
didn't surprise us. Maybe it surprised us that it happened this
soon. But to get back to your question, -- oh, I was going to say,
he wanted that to happen. I know, we went up, a couple of people,
drove up to Cincinnati to talk to him about it and make plans for
this thing. He was pleased about it and, it met with his approval
51
and then there was a little hassle about ?? he definitely wanted us
to go ahead with it, but that doesn't show any inordinate ego. Any
human being would like for people to recognize that they did do
something. I never got a feeling that he was jealous of Martin.
He was critical of Martin on different things, and so was I -- but
not a like of people that attacked Martin so when he was alive. He
would disagree with him on different things. But, you know, maybe
its there and I'm not aware of it. But I don't think it is
anything that's been eating at him, or we'd all know it. He was
always sort of matter-of- fact about Martin. I think he -- frankly
I can't tell you what their relationship was. I never saw them
that much together. I wasn ' t on the SCLC Board or anything where
they would necessarily be in a lot of discussion together . He
certainly didn't hero worship Martin. He had respect just like any
other coworker . In those days, nobody was treating Martin like a
God. He's been put up on a pedestal since, not then.
course, a lot of people were attacking him . Fred never did that.
He would criticize him . And I guess the story was told about when
Martin was ready to settle the things down there .
ANDREW MANIS: Other than that, do you know of others?
ANNE BRADEN: Of the times when they clashed. I don't, but I'm
sure there may have been. I don't know if it was bitter but it was
vehement because Fred was mad, this was his movement. He told me
one time that he disagreed with them in SCLC about the whole thing
of going North to Chicago. He thought that was a mistake. He
argued about that. He said we needed to stay here and integrate
52
the south and not get diverted to the north. He opposed that but
they did it. He thinks that weakened them and they missed the
moment when they could have been pushing ahead in the South. I've
heard him say that. In fact I think he said that as I quoted him.
I did an interview with him for the Southern Exposure a few years
ago on the school thing. Have you seen that?
ANDREW MANIS: Yes.
ANNE BRADEN: That's when he said that. I think that that' s in
that interview. But, I know the other thing I was going to tell
you about what Fred 's sort of leadership he gave which fits him
with the general resistance with the red scare. When Carl was
going to prison for contempt on the House Unamerican Committee.
See, that's where Martin really came through, one of the places, on
that issue. The House Unamerican Committee went to Atlanta in 1958
and subpoenaed Carl, and me, too, but my subpoena was postponed
with a bunch of other people for various things related to civil
rights and Carl, in essence, told them to go to hell. He told him
so many times. He told them to go back to Washington and he was
ci ted for contempt technical to the First Amendment. I was
thankful. liMy beliefs and associations are none of the business of
this committee. " That's what he told them . So in 1961 he ended up
going to jail. Because him and Frank Wilkinson were leading a
fight to abolish HUAC at that point and had come to Atlanta for the
hearings and was also subpoenaed so Frank and Carl went to jail
together in the spring of 1961 which was three years later after
the Supreme Court split five to four on their cases. When it was
53
clear Carl was going to jail, you know, we were constantly trying
to inform people about the whole issue of how this anticommunist
sort of hysteria was used to divide the movement and the role of
HUAC just gave us an opportunity to do it . So we set about to use
the fact that Carl was in jail to get more people to thinking about
the issue. That is the way we survived all those years. We
learned to its an art and we used it in a lot of things . I
learned to use every attack as a platform to reach more people who
never heard about your positions otherwise. It really worked. Not
just for us but for other cases we thought about and everything
because if you approach things that way then they can't win and you
can't lose because if they leave you alone you can just go right on
organizing and doing what you want to do. If they attack you, you
use that as a platform to organize more people. So that is what we
were going to do with that case so the Supreme Court decision was
in February upholding Carl's conviction . Then there was a delay
but he went to prison actually in May. I was in California on a
fundraising trip I think for SCEF the day that the decision came
down (drops microphone -- cannot hear) so while we were in Atlanta
- - but one of the things we would do would be to start a clemency
petition for Carl - - not that we were going to get clemency but
that was a method of protest. So I think I talked to Fred about it
first because Fred was president of SCEF and he thought it was a
good idea and that we would get key leaders, black and white to
initiate this petition and then we would get other people to sign -
- get the names that would allay people's fears. People were
54
really afraid to challenge HUAC. You just didn't challenge HUAC,
like you didn't challenge J. Edgar Hoover. So while I was in
Atlanta I called up Martin and he happened to be home. And he said
"Come out." I was in fairly close touch. I was never really that
close to them, him and Coretta -- much more than later after he got
to be such a world figure. I never tried to contact him that much
but in those days he wasn't quite what he was later. Carl and I
would sometimes stay at their house when we were in Atlanta. So I
had a little bit of a relationship. I wouldn't say it was real
close but at least I could call him up. So I thought if he knew
about the decision, so I thought I would go out to see him. So I
went out to the house. Martin was really a nice person. He was
being very solicitous about my husband going to jail and things
like that and what could he do and things like that. I said,
"Well, there is something, Martin, I want you to initiate a
clemency petition for Carl as a method of protest." He kind of
chuckled. I said, "I'm asking you to do it because you're the only
person in the south that can do it and get by with it. If you sign
it then other people will." He laughed and said, "Don't you know
they call me a communist, too?" I said, "Yeah, but nobody believes
it." So he said, "Well, he'd think about it." So we talked a
little bit more and I left. I told him I would call him the next
week. I called back. Well, I couldn't get him. He was busy.
That was right when the freedom rides were happening. No, no, I'm
sorry, it was before that. The Freedom Rides started in May. So
I was talking to Fred constantly about it because Martin was going
55
to sign it and Fred was going to sign it and we got a number of
people. Fred said we should get it started before Carl was
surrendered, which was going to be in May. (Unintelligible.) So
we established a deadline on getting it going. I remember I was
talking to Fred on the phone one day and we had a number of people
ready to sign but we never could get Martin back. He said, "Now,
Anne, we just got to go ahead with this thing.
longer on Martin. 1111 tell you about Martin.
We can!t wait any
It just takes so
long for Martin to get up that mountain of deci sion on anything."
He said, "Carl will be out of prison before we get this thing
going. Just forget about Martin." (Anne Braden laughs). So he
had respect for Martin and considered him a friend, you know, but
he was just another person. Martin wasnlt on a pedestal then. He
was just one more person. But Martin did come through. That has
nothing to do with Fred. I thought about that a lot, because there
was really nothing in that for Martin . He caught a lot of hell
about it, too, because the minute we publicized it, the press, of
course, called him immediately, and he made a real strong
statement. He didn I t get anything out of that except a lot of
hell. And he did it on principle, basically he did that for
principle. A lot of people were saying he was an opportunist and
he was just looking out for himself and compromising this, that or
the other. Well, he did compromise on things like the Pettus
Bridge and all that, but Martin didnlt want anybody to dislike him.
That was one of his problems. But I never believed any of this
stuff about him just doing things for his own advantage, on that
56
basis if nothing else because there wasn ' t anything in that for
him. And what happened was that I finally called Fred, said that,
I thought I guess I better go ahead. So I decided to try him once
more . It was a Saturday morning. It was the one time I ever tried
to call Martin Luther King that I had a sixth sense that he was
really there but he wouldn't come to the phone because she said he
was not there . I wouldn't accuse Coretta of a lie but I think he
was there. I just had that feeling. Maybe it was the tone of her
voice. She wasn ' t hostile. So I told myself "I guess Fred's
right. He's just not going to do this. He just can't bring himself
to that point. We'll get him to do something else later" which has
always been my philosophy . If you won't do something now, you'll
do something else later. The next morning, Sunday morning, early,
because it was before we went to church, around 8:00 O'clock in the
morning, the phone rang. It was Martin. He said, liAnne, I've been
praying about this thing, the petition. I want you to put my name
on it. II And I expect he had (been praying) I maybe not all night. So
he did.
ANDREW MAN I S : Just a couple more questions before we both fall
over. What, if any, critical, negatively critical things, have you
heard other people in the movement say about Shuttlesworth?
ANNE BRADEN: Let's see. (Long pause.) I'm sure there were some.
A lot of the younger people in SNCC who were very critical of
Martin, liked Fred a lot. They saw a difference between Fred and
Martin . But I think they were un just to Martin in some ways
because they would, - - and you know, they had a point, they would
57
say that the SNCC people would go in and do all the work, then
Martin came and got all the publicity and then left . Well, he
couldn't help that. He was wanted in a thousand places. That was
one of the things that they jumped on him about, that he wouldn't
stay in a place, that SCLC didn't . That wasn't their way of
operating . And most of the people who were critical of Martin were
very friendly to Fred because I think they felt like Fred had dug
in somewhere and worked with people. And nobody -- I've never
heard anybody criticize Fred for moving to Cincinnati. Now maybe
people did, but I never heard it. Because, in a way, I don ' t think
people were even aware he was gone. He came back so much for one
thing. But I never heard anybody be critical there, although the
younger people were critical of Martin a lot . Part of it was
money. SNCC was doing so much of the work and people in the early
days at least, they didn't have fundraising and the people would
read in the paper about the beautiful brave students, and then
write a check to SCLC. But those people really admired Fred
Shuttlesworth. I think he had more respect from the younger people
in the movement than King did or Abernathy or others in SCLC
because they admired his courage. So I am trying to think.
ANDREW MANIS: Physical kind or the moral kind or both?
ANNE BRADEN: I think they thought more in terms of the physical
kind. I don't think t hey thought one way or the other on the
other. But just the fact that he was backing Birmingham, people
respected that. And the fact that he stayed there and in the
consciousness of most people he did stay there. He moved his
58
family and his base to Cincinnati but he was still in Birmingham
fighting. So, I don't know. I guess, well, by the time he was
real active as president of SCEF, and our board and staff began to
grow, and a lot of people came into SCEF. Some of them were
critical of Fred. They thought he ran the meetings with an iron
hand and that he was sort of a dictator.
ANDREW MANIS: Do you think he was?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, I don't know internally about the Birmingham
movement because I wasn't there. I wasn't a part of that movement.
I think that he probably made the basic decisions in that movement.
As far as what they were talking about in SCEF, I think it was a
phoney issue in a way. He would preside in a meeting. You know,
he was used to getting through a meeting and getting it done. I'll
tell you some of these people would want to sit around all night
and talk about things. That just wasn't Fred's way of operating.
So, part of it was style.
my impression of Fred
SCEF eventually broke up.
I think it was a little unfair in that
well, he and I had a disagreement when
That is a whole different story. But
different theories ?? I had my theories. I think the government
had its hand in it but we didn't know that at the time but the
problem was that at one time we had acquired this big staff for
SCEF. We attracted all these whites really who didn't know where
to go. Some of them were pretty good. Some weren 't. The
organization was nearly being run by the staff. The board was
irrelevant. I tried to repair that at one point, and Fred went
along with it at the time, and we merged the board and staff. He
59
said later and I think he still says this, that was the reason SCEF
broke up and that once we decided that everybody's equal, that was
going to destroy the organization. I said, "Fred, I thought we
believed in equality?" "Well, you can't decide everybody's equal."
So verbally you have these things he says that you can interpret as
being anti-democratic. But in life it doesn't really work out that
way. One thing that has really impressed me about Fred is that,
you know, for somebody who really did have a good bit of acclaim,
you know, in a certain area, pretty young, and in a certain milieu,
and around certain specific issues, Fred has constantly grown with
the times, I think, in his thinking and moved on to what the
current issues are. He doesn't live in the past. He'll talk about
it but anyone likes to talk about it. I don't think Fred really
lives in the past, unless you are interviewing him about the past.
He is aware of what ' s going on now. He is really just as sharp as
he can be about everything current . Maybe his experience with SCEF
possibly influenced him in terms -- I ' ve watched him in meetings in
soc now, and he really does listen to other people. A dictator
doesn't and Baptist preachers often don't. But I think that,
probably came out of his experience with SCEF, especially when
there were a lot of, when we were super democratic. He did learn
to listen. He might say things like, "You can't make everybody
equal," but he was listening to the younger people.
ANDREW MANIS: Give me a few examples where you perceive that his
vision has broadened with the times.
ANNE BRADEN: Well, through the years, we can go back to some in
60
the past and some now because, for one thing, his willingness to
associate with us when a lot of people would not. You should ask
him how he saw that. I never have. But when he first met us he
was bound to know we were dangerous. Now later, he developed a
respect for us and how we worked . But I don't know what he thought
about us in the beginning . I ' ve never asked him that. You might
ask him . But apparently, he sure wasn't afraid of us and I think
that he probably, as I say, you should see what he says, my gut
feeling is that some of it was a gut feeling on his part. I think,
because of the way things in the South were then, that you know any
white person that is going to stand up against the system, is going
to be under attack. Well, he expected to be under attack. So
maybe it wasn ' t that shocking. But he also knew it was dangerous .
That was partly a gut reaction . I think he figured we were on his
side and if he could fight Bull Connor he wasn't going to let
people to tell him to associate with. But that's my surmise. You
can ask him. But he went on from there . It wasn't theoretical
from the beginning . Now I think with Martin -- I think there was
a certain sort of a solidarity thing -- you don I t desert your
friends if they're under attack . But I think Martin was cerebral
and thought things out intellectually and I think that he decided
that it was a matter of important principle to fight HUAC and what
it was doing, that kind of thing, more theoretically probably than
Fred in the beginning but maybe after corning into the association
with us from a gut level thing, he did do a lot of thinking about
it and about what we called a plan and he thought about it too, of
61
the relationship with civil liberties and civil rights, that you
couldn't separate them. That's the way we used to put it. And you
can't have civil rights unless you have freedom of speech and all
these people that are trying to control what people think is, you
know, attacking. We talked about it a lot. I think its a misnomer
now, looking back at it. There were a lot of pamphlets about it.
What we were talking about wasn't really -- it wasn't the way civil
liberties -- really what we were talking about was the sickness of
mindless sort of anticommunism. But Fred still talks about his
relationship with civil rights and civil liberties. Like you said,
he was a Baptist preacher in Alabama -- he didn't take a course in
consti tutional law somewhere. But he saw it in life and he
internalized what that issue was about and he made speeches about
it. Same thing on the Viet Nam War. When that came along there
was a big debate in SCEF about whether we would take a position on
the war. The board, Martin came out against it in 1964 or 1965.
We didn't when it first came up. It was probably Fall of 1965. It
was right after that that SCLC took a position and then we did. We
adopted a resolution that we would encourage debate about the war
and so we set up a program called "Operation Open Debate." But
this whole thing about not mixing civil rights and other things, I
didn't agree with that. And I think we could have won the vote at
our first meeting to come out against the war but we didn't push it
because it would have split the organization. Fred hadn't really
thought about that. I can't remember. It was possible he wasn't at
that meeting. I don't have any vivid memory of him being a part of
62
that debate. I'm not sure but it went on and on and I think that
he, like a lot of people, for instance, they had to do a lot of
rethinking, but pretty soon he came to a strong position against
it. So those are things from the past and since then -- well this
is a little diversion, but let me tell you one thing, see, one good
thing about having him as president of SCEF -- things were so
tumultuous. Fred could always keep his eye on the ball. He always
asked the right questions. I think he kept us from getting on the
wrong track sometimes. I remember when we were setting up what we
called the Southern Mountain project because we did a lot of stuff
for Appalachia, because what we were trying to do in the late
sixties was set up pilot projects that would create some model for
poor white working people and black people organizing together. We
thought we were right about it. We didn't have many resources. We
got a few things done but I think our analysis was right, that the
civil rights movement cracked things open there, that it was
possible, that people wouldn't have dreamed of such a coalition in
the past could see that this was a great opportunity, which I think
was true and is what the Rainbow (Coalition) represents now. So
when we started talking about that, he was in those meetings, and
he was all for it but he said, "Now we're not gonna desert the
blacks while we go organize the white people in the mountains, are
we?" It wasn't just because he was black. That was really astute
because some organizations that went out to organize poor white
people, left the black issue and the black struggles behind. He
was all for the black/white coalition thing. He still is, but he
63
wasn't going to let us get off concentrating on getting to whites
and forget about where the heart of the struggle was. That was
very important, and I think he was right. Well, when we were
trying to get somebody with prestige to come to Greensboro and
people there were scared to death. He lent his name to that and he
was the biggest name we had at the press conference. Other people
came later . But he was there .
ANDREW MANIS: Let me go ahead and get you to sum up your thoughts
in a sense that what do you think his overall significance is in
the movement and if there is another anecdote or an interpretation
that you think that anybody writing this book should at least hear.
ANNE BRADEN: I know I'll think of other things later.
ANDREW MANIS: I realize I'm putting you on the spot to be eloquent
here at the end of the interview and it is rather late for
eloquence.
ANNE BRADEN : Well, before I do that, see, I think the thing that,
see, Fred, even today, he has a basic understanding that what is
going to change history is people at the grass roots moving. Even
though it might not have been a shared leadership sort of thing in
Birmingham at the time of that big mass movement there . He never
thought he could win it by himself. He would go to Phillips High
School with whomever he could get, which wasn't that many people.
He I d have had more if they had gone. He knew it was masses of
people who were going to make the difference. He's never lost that
sort of understanding -- all during the Reagan period. If you
listen to Fred talk - - I mean he comes to SOC work shops, the
64
tenant movement, grass roots sort of people. He'll take time to
talk about what just plain people were able to do in Birmingham.
He always uses that as an example for people now. He i s constantly
applying that to now. But in terms of deciding, assessing what his
significance in history is --
ANDREW MANIS: I understand, that's my job.
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, but I suppose you think you got to be
objective. I don't know why, but you probably do. So I probably
would put it stronger than you ever would. You see, so much of
that hinges on how you interpret the importance of the black
liberation struggle. To me, it's the key to the whole history of
the country, and to any sort of progress. My theory about our
history is that because this country was built on racism basically,
that it's just built into the system and that is what has corrupted
our freedom and democracy and everything else, but it is also on
the other side of that coin that whenever black people move for
freedom, this is what expands freedom for everybody and moves the
country in a humane direction basically. You can point to
different periods of history, like Reconstruction after the Civil
War, and the more recent times and the sixties, basically, was a
movement toward a more humane society. Then it got pushed back in
the seventies and you had a movement away from the humane values.
So, if you -- I start with the assumption that the key to moving
this country in a humane direction has been that struggle of blacks
for freedom. If you agree with that, then somebody like Fred
Shuttlesworth is a key factor in that movement which moves the
65
country in the direction that I think is right for human beings.
It was an essential factor. There are some things that -- history
is going to move. No one individual makes history and no one
individual made the black struggle, including Martin Luther King.
But there are people that, if they had not been there, that history
might have been a little different. You just can't get away from
that. And I think Fred is probably one of them. If he hadn't been
there, maybe somebody else would have, but if he hadn't been there,
I don't think things would have stayed the way they were in
Birmingham, but they wouldn't have moved as fast and they wouldn't
have moved when they did very likely. If he hadn't had the guts to
stand up we wouldn't have had that big move in Birmingham I don't
think. Eventually some of the same things might have happened, but
I think Birmingham was the key in terms of a turning point at that
particular phase of the struggle, so I think -- maybe he's right,
maybe God did send him to do all that. (Anne Braden laughs).
ANDREW MANIS: Well, it wasn't too late for some last minute
eloquence. Thank you very much for your time.
66

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Holding.Institution

Birmingham Public Library (Alabama)

Full Text

This is an interview with Anne Braden, close associate of Fred
Shuttlesworth in the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.
The interview was conducted at her horne in Louisville, Kentucky, on
October 29, 1988, by Andrew Manis.
ANDREW MANIS: Do you remember the circumstances of your first
meeting with Reverend Shuttlesworth?
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, I remember it very vividly. Just to sort of
explain or give you a meaningful picture regarding my association
with Shuttlesworth, I need to ask you a couple of questions. In
your research, have you done any sort of thinking about looking
into the whole red scare of the fifties?
ANDREW MANIS: I've seen some of it from articles in the Southern
Patriot.
ANNE BRADEN: You read Southern· Patriot?
ANDREW MANIS: And so I know the kind of thing that happened with
(Jim) Dombrowski in New Orleans but it is still very hazy. At this
point I haven't pieced it all together. I know the basic
background.
ANNE BRADEN: You're not quite sure what it is all about? It would
take a short interview to tell you what it was all about, but from
my point of view it was a very important part of history in our
country and the world. I will have to allude to it a number of
times because my relationship with Shuttlesworth was very much tied
up with that. It reveals a certain part of his character which I
think is very important, but may not come out in other things. Let
me just sort of state the thesis and then I'll tell you what I
1
mean. See, in that period, 1957, I forgot exactly when I first met
him but I remember it quite vividly -- beginning in 1957 when I
first met him and until the present really, I feel very close to
Shuttlesworth. We see each other a lot now. Considering he lives
a hundred miles from here, not a lot. I haven't seen him on a
daily basis but he is one of the people I am really close to and
I feel I have worked closely with him for years. I don't want to
talk about myself, but to understand what Shuttlesworth is all
about, you have to know a little bit about me to understand his
relationship with me and my husband and the other people I work
with.
ANDREW MANIS: Feel free.
ANNE BRADEN: The thing that always struck me, and I will just try
to summarize this. It took a lot of courage for people to do the
kind of things that were done in terms of what was happening in the
south in that period and I think Shuttlesworth is probably the most
courageous person I ever knew in my life. But there are different
kinds of courage. I've thought about that many times and it takes
a lot of physical courage to go walking to Phillips High School
like he did, you know. 11m sure you have talked to him about it,
and have your life threatened, face the fire hose, and a lot of
such things. That takes physical courage. A lot of people had
that type of courage or we wouldn't be where we are tOday. But
there was another thing going on in that period in which there was
a whole attack on a lot of people associated with the civil rights
movement as being communist, as being subversive, as being traitors
2
to the country, especially on whites who supported the civil rights
movement. It's not quite that simple but that is the way it came
out. I was one of the people who was under attack like that. I 'm
sure if you've lived in Louisville, you've heard a little about
that. That I was a symbol, sort of. It didn't have much to do
with what I really was. But I remember other people I worked with
but I was in the position, I have thought about a lot of this
history, I mean, I really had to fight for my right to be a part of
the civil rights movement. Some people didn't believe me when I
said that. I have just been at a women's conference in Atlanta
about women in the civil rights movement at the King Center at and
Georgia State University.
ANDREW MANIS: I was there right before it started.
ANNE BRADEN: It was very interesting really. There were a lot of
women who carne. There was a mixture of scholars. But a lot of
younger people ignored me when I said that, you see. Because I was
always attacked as being subversive. Now this I know was serious
stuff in the 1950s. So a lot of people were afraid to associate
with me. It is so much a part of my life that it is hard to say it
but see, you live in a different period of history and might not
realize how hysterical things were.
and other people connected with
Not only me, Jim Dombrowski,
SCEF (Southern Conference
Educational Fund), and there's a history to that, and I may come
back to that a little bit, to show you where it was . Anyway,
people reacted in different ways to that. It's a good study of
human beings.
3
ANDREW MANIS: When you say people, you mean blacks in the civil
rights?
ANNE BRADEN: Blacks and whites and everybody in this country who
fit in with blacks in the civil rights movement but .
ANDREW MANIS: I assume that's what you meant when you said you had
to fight for your right to be in the movement?
ANNE BRADEN: Dh yeah, but that was in the context of people
reacting in interesting ways to that sort of fear and people did
some strange things and it produced some really cowardly sort of
things, it produced people betraying their friends, and it produced
some really courageous things, too, and you can see the human
character in times of stress. At that level, just like you can in
Birmingham with the fire hoses at a different level. No, there
were people who were a part of the civil rights upsurge that we
went on and who for one reason or another were very cautious about
associating with anybody who had a subversive label. I would say
hostile. The hostile people were usually white, really, and there
were some of the white liberals who were afraid of getting too
labeled and didn't want to associate with people like us. But some
of the blacks were very legitimately cautious. Why take this on,
when they have all this other?
ANDREW MANIS: Can you name some names of those who were cautious?
ANNE BRADEN: Who was cautious? I'm not sure I want to be quoted
on that because some of them have come around since, you know. I
don't know. Let me think about that. Yeah, I think there is ??
ahead.
4
ANDREW MANIS: You notice I said "naming some names."
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, it took the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, which, of course, when I first met Fred, hadn't formed
yet. I think in that year it formed, but within the Southern
Leadership Conference, in that nucleus of leadership, there were
big debates as to whether they would cooperate with SCEF on things.
Now, Martin Luther King, you're not writing about him, at the
nodding point, came to that realization and it took some struggle
on his part. I spent hours talking with him and other people did.
And it took some other people who didn't. He was under terrific
pressure but he did, I think, take a heroic part . He was resisting
this sort of fear and derision. A lot of people don't know that
story. That's not what you're writing about. I wondered why his
biographers have avoided it so. They don't really want to deal with
it twenty years later, but I told a lot about it.
ANDREW MANIS: Feel free to tell that story .
ANNE BRADEN: It ties in with Fred later and we will come to that.
But I think he was very courageous because of the things he did in
regard to me and my husband, there was nothing in it for him. It
was just a matter of principle. Anyway, it is very hard, I am sure
to imagine, I don't know how you can capture it in a book, but you
didn't live in that time, how afraid people were . So that the
phenomenon that I saw a number of times that people had physical
courage I more that I have , and I thought I had much, and would
stand up to the fear of death, could not stand up to the thought of
being called a traitor to their country and the atmosphere that was
5
going on. So, there are two kinds of courage. One is physical
courage and one is moral courage. I remember sitting around one
time where we were at some meeting after being in somebody ' s hotel
room . Andy Young was there. This must have been late fifties or
early sixties . I was saying there were different kinds of courage
and I said, "There's physical courage and there is moral courage.
And as we talk about these things, I really don't think I have much
physical courage. 1I (Laughs.) The reason I wanted to put it in
this context is that Fred Shuttlesworth, as much as anybody I can
think of, had both. And I think that, I hope that, once you write
about him, you will touch on both because I think that his physical
courage and the fact that, if there hadn't been someone like Fred
in Birmingham, I don't know whether we would ever have broken this
segregation thing. He was the man for the job because it took
somebody like Fred . And I 'm talking about physical courage who had
the pure guts, and sometimes almost by himself. Now he rallied
around him a mass movement but he probably got some enemies from
it . In the beginning he was just there by himself, by God, he was
going to stand up. I 'm not sure that the whole back of segregation
could have been broken without somebody like that and probably,
theologically, he would say this, too. My theology's different but
God sent him to do this, see, because there had to be somebody like
that. Maybe God did because I don ' t know that it ever would have
happened otherwise . I 'm getting ahead of my story . I 'm leaving
out a part I want to get back to. There were weaknesses in that as
I am sure you discern because he was a one man leader. I think.
6
But it was that terrific courage that was an audaciousness -- to
take on Bull Connor -- that was uncommon. People rallied around
that but they rallied around Fred as a great leader. I don't think
Fred ever thought of himself as a great leader, but he functioned
that way, and in those days, I think Fred has changed a lot through
the years, he's terrifically sensitive and smart. You know, he
picks up things. But he wasn't the most democratic person. Well,
black preachers are maybe preachers, but they rule with an iron
hand, especially the Baptists. You know, you're a Baptist. You
may -- the Baptists always say they run a democratic denomination
because there is no bishop telling them what to do but the preacher
rules his church with an iron hand. It's that kind of condition,
but I think -- and I think that Fred would say this now, that -now
he left there and after his move he still went back there as a
leader for years and still is in a way. In more recent years he
has commuted to Birmingham. But he didn't develop a lot of leaders
he left behind. NOw, I think that over the years when he first was
active in SCEf a lot of the young people thought Fred was sort of
a dictator, I think that over the years he developed a much more
democratic approach, much more of interest in involving other
people. But, I think that most of us have strong qualities, but
the other side of that coin is our weakness. The fact is that Fred
was undemocratic and that he was a one man show or whatever, that
was what Birmingham needed at that time. So, the main point I was
thinking about was that he had this tremendous courage that he
needed but he had the other kind of courage, too, in terms of he
7
did not care what people said. If he decided who his friends were
he was not going to let anyone tell him who to associate with them.
Now I don't know where he got that and I think -- I don't know -maybe
you can relate it to your theology because in times I think
refusal to be afraid of associating with people like us, it was not
the main background of study that this was all about. It was just
some gut thing, I think, that he wasn't going to let anybody tell
him, so those are general things, the way I see them. I have seen
so very -- and the others of course, and I don't think Fred, in
fact, I have tried to encourage him to move back to Birmingham to
retire and lead the movement there today, you know, the regional
movement, which we are in the process of building. I think he
might like to make a living as he does it. But I think -- I don't
think any story of him is complete without this element. That's
what I am trying to say. So, that is the background. The first
time I met him was June, 1957. I can remember the date because it
was connected with other things. My husband, Carl, and I went to
Birmingham to meet with Jim Dombrowski, you probably don't know who
he was, and Aubrey Williams, who was president of SCEF. Jim didn't
know Fred either. I don't believe he had met him at that time. We
went down there to Birmingham on a weekend to talk with Jim and
Aubrey about our going to work for SCEF on the SCEF staff. Because
SCEF didn't have any money and was a voice crying in the wilderness
and Jim was the only star person they had. There was a board
meeting. There was a resistance to us really to the white citizens
council and a lot of things in this kind of network. It really was
8
an interracial organization . But mainly trying to get whites to
speak out. Do you want to interrupt?
ANDREW MANIS: Yes, I do. As you're doing this, go ahead and give
me some of your perspective, the background of the Southern
Conference Education Fund, SCEF, its purpose and the organization
they had.
ANNE BRADEN: Okay. Before I get back to that, let me try to
briefly summarize it because that's a history I'm going to write
someday. There are a lot of people writing about it but I don't
trust them. About 1957, SCEF descended from the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare, which you are probably familiar with,
which was formed in 1938 in Birmingham . And we're going to have
next fall the organization I work with now which has descended from
all this (we should have done it this year but nobody had time)
our fiftieth anniversary thing . We decided we just couldn't do it
with Jesse Jackson running for president. We decided somebody has
got to do a fiftieth anniversary. Fred was in a meeting.
Actually, we planned this last month . So we thought of a way we
could do it in 1989 instead of 1988, which was to talk about
starting the second half of the century, looking forward to the
future instead of looking at the past. Lately we have been having
all these anniversaries and this, that and the other. But here
we've got fifty years. But the Southern Conference, which I was
not a part of, because that was before my day . I was a child. I'm
64 years old and I was a child in the thirties. But I know I am
oversimplifying this. There haven't been too many books written,
9
you may have read Promises to Keep. Do you know about it?
ANDREW MANIS: No.
ANNE BRADEN: I l oaned my copy to somebody. It was written by a
guy -- I think his name was vanderbilt . It's the only book really
that has been written about the Southern Conference. It is worth
reading. I can tell you the weaknesses of it. It was written in
the 1950s. So, it has a 1950s perspective and I haven't read it in
a long time. There are some scholarly people who write books that
are doing some -- there's a woman in North Carolina who has done
research on the Southern Conference.
ANDREW MANIS: Linda Reed?
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, you know her. And then there is a guy named
Klibaner, who is from Wisconsin, who did a paper on SCEF, it was
his thesis. The Southern Conference has been partially covered in
other books but I don't know if very adequately. Turning to some
of the more traditional histories, its just like SCEF, its being
cut out of history, just like they tried to t ell me it didn't exist
then. Promises to Keep is worth reading. I said at first it was
written in the 1950s -- it's the Southern Conference in retrospect
later, fairly accurate. It was very much read and called a
communist front and so forth. This guy who wrote Promises t o Keep,
its from a poem about "I have many miles t o go and promises to
keep" was very friendly toward communism -- it was a friendly book
but it was almost like he was sitting there writing the book and
agreeing that the Southern Conference was in the communist front
which might have been relevant in the fifties when he wrote the
10
book but was not relevant in the forties when the Southern
Confer ence emerged. I mean nobody gave a damn. So when you read
the book it was almost like it was the wrong emphasis, that he was
writing about the thirties from the viewpoint of the fifties which
were very different periods of history. But it's worth r eading.
Anyway, it was formed in 1938 in Birmingham, at a big conference,
and the proceedings were published at some libraries, etc . People
came from allover the South. It was formed really as different
strands that came together. One of the strands was the New Deal.
That strand was that Roosevelt was being riddled by the southern
congressmen . He had made a speech in Milledgeville, Georgia, the
year before calling on southerners to rise up and make their
congressmen do something about the blocking of his reform program.
He appointed a commission, or a committee or something, to study
the South and came out with this major report, "The South -- the
Nation's No. One Economic Problem" and a bunch of people wrote that
report and it was highly publicized . At the same time the CIO was
organized and later organized. Blacks were beginning to organize .
But people forget that there was a major force in the thirties and
I think the major of motive force. Coming out of the repression of
the last fifty years after reconstruction. Came out underneath the
Scottsboro Case, if you've read any of Hosea Hudson's stuff, the
miners organized in Birmingham. It was the black miners first that
organized. So with all that stirring going on and there was a guy
named Joe Gelders who grew up in Birmingham. I've always been
fascinated by him. Nobody ever has -- he seemed to come from a
11
very prominent Jewish family in Birmingham who was highly respected
as native Jews were in Alabama. I grew up with this. There was a
difference in Alabama Jewish folk and New York Jews with whom I am
associated. He had this dramatic turnaround during the depression
which a lot of people did. They couldn't understand why people
were hungry when there was too much but they understood why people
were hungry when there wasn't enough, but when there was too much.
And he was probably a communist . I really don't know and most of
the people I talk to don't know. But very active in the
Scottsboro case and things. He got ambushed on the streets of
Birmingham one night and dragged off and left for dead by these
hoodlums. But he wasn't dead and he called somewhere and got some
help and he lived. But he died prematurely in 1950 as a result of
those internal injuries, although he was active after that. Very
dramatic because of the hearings of the Lafollette committee that
was investigating labor, I went to a library and looked up those
Lafollette hearings. The testimony comes out where the people who
ambushed him on the streets of Birmingham were agents of the
Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Anyway Joe Gelders was apparently
a very outstanding person and Jim Dombrowski learned more about him
and talked about him. But he was so aware of all this. So he went
up to Hyde Park to see Mrs. Roosevelt and to tell her what was
happening and would you support this and she said she would. He
was the main organizer really and worked himself to death getting
that conference together apparently and I don't think he came
because he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So it was the
12
corning together of a lot of different times and was a real mixture
of people and, of course, later, but this was really after World
War II, when the House unamerican Committee issued a major report.
The first major report it ever issued was on the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare, which really wasn't what destroyed the
Southern Conference but was an attack on it. I asked Jim
Dombrowski one time, of course their thing was that, you know, this
was all organized by communists and then there was -- it was such
a vicious report there was a guy named Gearhorn, a law
professor, who did a report on the report. He studied the report
and all the things that were wrong with it. He said there were
five communists there. I think there were more than that. But I
asked him one day, because he was a part of all this. I said,
"Jim, did the communists organize the Southern Conference?" He
said, "Nobody organized the Southern Conference. Joe Gelders did a
lot of work but you just don't understand. Things were so bad
then, people were hungry. They didn't have any jobs. All they had
to do was put a notice in the paper that something was going to
happen and people came." I think this was true. It suggested
that's sort of the way things were in those days. So out of that
they formed the Southern Conference and in it was a multi-issue.
It was a New Deal program basically. It was certainly no
revolutionary organization, it was formed supporting the New Deal
program and it was for economic purposes. I think it was what we
are talking about now in the Jesse Jackson rainbow movement -- it
was just fifty years ahead of its time. I think that's a whole lot
13
of -- but the deal was not formed as a civil rights group or to
deal with the issue of segregation initially. But what's always
interested me about it, because in my perspective, you can't deal
with any of these things without dealing with racism, but people
came there to try to deal with the economic problems in the South
and they ran right into the issue of racism. Because, as you have
probably heard this story, Bull Connor was Police Commissioner
then. He was out for a while and came back by the time all the
stuff was happening in the fifties and sixties . He was Police
Commissioner when I was a reporter there in the late forties. And
as Police Commissioner he issued a decree that blacks and whites
couldn ' t sit together and that is when he made a statement, and I
saw the notice , that as long as he was Police Commissioner of
Birmingham the "niggers and whites weren't going to segregate
together. " So that was when Mrs. Roosevelt moved her chair to the
middle of the aisle to protest that decree. My interpretation of
that is "Okay, we need to talk about jobs, labor organizing, farm
problems and all that but they got to deal with segregation before
they can deal with these. " So there became a civil rights
organization and took on the whole issue of voting rights and some
of the early suits on t he white primary that they were involved,
and then they set up this battle against the poll tax and then
initiated the campaign to eliminate the poll tax and a coalition
called the "National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, " which
eventually became bigger than the Southern Conference itself and
sort of spearheaded the voting rights movement and other things
14
related to the civil rights issue . For ten years, 1938 to 1948,
when the Southern Conference met and voted itself out of existence
which was just recognizing the fact that it happened . They had
carried on the poll tax campaign and a whole bunch of other things
around issues of economic justice as well as voting rights and
civil rights. It became a pretty powerful force. There were
membership organizations. They grew during World War II. After
the war and you've read the Patriot during that period, I was
always fascinated by it. Each month in the Patriot they would have
reports on how many members they had gotten. They were growing
very rapidly in 1945 and 1946. They set up state affiliates. They
had the Committee for North Carolina, the Committee for Georgia,
the Committee for Alabama. And then some way within two or three
weeks, it collapsed like a house of cards. People had different
theories about why . That was the beginning of the Cold War and
domestically a lot of progressive organizations collapsed and this
was obviously the organization of the South that the witch-hunters
were after. That wasn't the whole story though. Jim Dombrowski
always said that's not what destroyed them -- the outside attack.
He said it was fiscal irresponsibility. Jim became very
conservative financially and when I was working with SCEF he would
never let us spend a nickel we didn ' t have to or borrow any money.
He said they really could have survived the outside attack but they
expanded so fast and there were other people on the staff and they
couldn't pay the people they had and eventually the people had to
leave and do something else and it just fell apart. I think that's
15
only part of the story, too. The other thing is, what happened
was, that in 1948, Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party came
along . A lot of people connected with the Southern Conference -not
all of them, went heart and soul for that . Clark Foremen wrote
a pamphlet "Ten Years of Hope" about the history of the Southern
Conference. His theory was that their whole objective had been to
work for a political shift, a shift in the political power in the
South and here they saw the Wallace movement as a third party
movement was going to bring a change, which it did start out with
that premise, forty years ahead of its time. A lot of people who
had put their energy into the Southern Conference went into the
Wallace campaign. When that collapsed they never were able to
regroup as a nonpolitical organization . Meantime, the Southern
Conference Educational Fund had started as a purely paper wing of
the Southern Conference as a tax exempt thing. A lot of
organizations still do have sort of a tax exempt thing as an
educational part but it wasnlt really that separate as I understand
it. But after the Southern Conference collapsed or was in the
process of collapsing SCEF was still there. There was a whole
internal thing, too, between Dombrowski and Clark Foreman, and they
tried to kick Jim over to SCEF which I donlt think is important in
terms of the long range political trends . And then what Jim always
told me was that things are in sort of disarray and in 1948 or
somewhere along in there -- he loved to fish -- he was living in
New Orleans by then because the Southern Conference would meet
every two years and it set up its office wherever it met. They
16
were in Nashville, then Chattanooga, then moved to New Orleans.
They had had the third such conference in New Orleans. So he went
fishing one weekend on the Gulf to just get away and think about
what had to be done now and decided that the main thing that all
these issues that the Southern Conference had dealt with were
obviously important, but that none of them could be dealt with or
even scratch the surface until segregation was destroyed and that
was the main issue -- racial segregation -- and that what it needed
was an organization with a single purpose -- to destroy segregation
in the South and to bring blacks and whites together on the theory
that it was just as much in the interest of whites as blacks. He
reorganized SCEF basically with that single point program -- to
destroy segregation -- and he pulled together at least nine or ten
people to do that -- black and white. That was before I was
associated with SCEF, too, but in that period from about 1948 to
1954, they would have conferences on desegregation and higher
education. And they carried on a big campaign about discrimination
in the hospitals. In fact that is where I first got in touch with
SCEF was in a fight against hospital discrimination. Not
segregation because they wouldn't even let blacks into the
hospital.
ANDREW MANIS: You and your husband?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, we were working here in the late forties and
early fifties. There was a situation here where three men died on
a hospital floor in Breckenridge County (Kentucky) and other things
like that. It really upset people so there was a thing formed
17
called the UInterracial Hospital movement. II We learned some
things, too. We had written into state law that a hospital
couldn't refuse anybody in emergency care anyway . But I think it
was in that period that Jim heard about that some way and got in
touch with us. That's the first time I heard about SCEF. Then
there was a guy who worked on the newspaper here with SCEF. But
that was sort of a thing they would do, too. They had people like
us. At that time we were just working here locally trying to deal
with an issue on SCEF or get in touch with them to link them up
with other things that were going on and they had a southwide
campaign going on in hospitals discrimination and other aspects of
segregation that they were trying to deal with, mainly from an
information and educational point of view. Some legislative sort
of things, some court cases, but mainly just getting information to
people, but mainly trying to lift up the vision of what the society
could be like if they didn't have to deal with segregation, through
various publications and conferences and things like that. When
SCEF began to grow, the board was fairly small in the beginning,
and Senator Eastland who headed the Internal Subcommittee which was
sort of a Senate parallel of the House Unamerican Activities
Committee, went to New Orleans and had this big hearing in March
1954 on SCEF. They subpoenaed Jim and Aubrey and a whole bunch of
people and made their attack on SCEF, mainly based on the old
Southern Conference. I used to say these committees scratched each
others backs. They had the initial report of the House Unamerican
Activities Committee about the Southern Conference being a
18
Communist front or the main vehicle of Communism in the south or
something . Then Eastland would quote that as an authority, that
SCEF was descended from the Southern Conference. And then the
Florida Unamerican Committee would quote that and then he would
issue a report. And the HUAC would pick up the Florida Committee
and quote it. They scratched each others backs for two decades .
Jim's response then to the Eastland attack was to write a whole
bunch of people around the South and said in effect "Senator
Eastland has attacked us . Wouldn ' t you like to spit in Senator
Eastland's eye by joining the SCEF Board." He didn't put it that
way but that was basically it. And the people did. And the board
sort of quadrupled its size overnight. And at that time -- it was
at that point where it was a political act to join SCEF, the SCEF
Board . We began, my husband and I got much closer to it during our
fight, which I am not going to go into now, but I'm sure you have
heard about the House situation and stuff like that. But t hey were
very supportive of us in that when we were charged with sedition,
and so we began to be in close touch with them and then they were
trying to figure some way, because it was the only voice really
that was Southern Regional Council, was the only other
interracial organization in the South and they were doing some good
work. I got respect for what they were doing except they were redbaiting
us allover the place and I don't think that's anything to
respect, but they were forming these councils on human relations,
but we were more action oriented . But, you know we're all voices
crying in the wilderness . And SCEF needed somebody -- well, Jim
19
was trying to do what he could for the organization. He needed
somebody to travel around and we wanted -- I guess we had come out
of that case here . We had wanted to do more than we had before and
we were willing t o work for nothing, really. And so we went to
work as field secretaries for SCEF in 1957. That is when we went
to Birmingham where we met Fred. We had gone down there, but while
we were there -- and we talked about this -- Jim had -- I think
that is the first time he had tried to contact Fred. Fred's church
had been bombed back in December 1956 which would have been about
six months before that. And the Alabama Christian movement had
been formed and Jim would do that. He would just get in touch with
people who were struggling and offer whatever s upport. He had no
financial support and had no political clout, but any sort of
support was welcomed in a way at that time except people who were
afraid. And often people were afraid. I remember even to be
associated I remember sitting at breakfast or something with
Aubrey and Jim. And Jim had tried to call him and he had t o call
him back. Aubrey was holding his head kind of disgusted like Fred
was afraid to associate with SCEF. But obviously it wasn't so,
because Fred was busy or something. But, while we were there, we
did talk t o him and he asked us to come over to the Gaston Motel,
which you know about. I think it's still there. Somebody, C. T.
Vivian, was talking about that lately. No, Jack Odell was talking
about Paschal's in Atlanta, used to be the one place you could have
an interracial meeting. It was in the black community. It's still
a really good motel. A lot of people still go there. I do when I
20
go to Atlanta. That was the only place t hat there was any hope of
anything interracial . Even that was against the law -- to meet.
It was illegal for blacks and whites to meet . But they did it
anyway. So Fred was staying at the Gaston, because his house had
been bombed as well as the church and they were sort of rebuilding
the house or building another one across the street. But he was
living there at the Gaston. So he told us to come down there at
the Gaston Motel. So we went down t here and met him . I don't
remember too much about the conversation but he said he wanted to
show us the church and the house. So we went out and got a cab,
and were riding along, and Fred said, lIyou know we're breaking the
law? II riding in the cab, because it was illegal to ride
(integrated). So we went out there and he showed us -- they were
in the process of rebuilding the c hurch and the house. We just
talked some and I guess that Jim asked him to join the board of
SCEF and he did. Sometime during that period he began coming to
SCEF meetings. And you know, we had known him in a way a lot
better than other people that we were working with in the same way.
It was just that there was so much -- Birmingham was so impossible.
And, you know, just like a stone wall there , we began to try to get
the word out to people around the country what was happening in
Birmingham . That was one thing we could do something on. Of
course, Fred , instead of talking about this and looking back on it ,
he credits SCEF for saving his life sometimes because we were able
to get the word out. He would call and couldn't get pUblicity
there. The only way he could get the press to cover anythi ng would
21
be to get some paper in Pennsylvania or Louisville to call the
Associated Press and request a story from Birmingham. That was
done all the time when they were ignoring things in the South . It
wasn't that unusual, it was the way we operated. Then we would put
out a lot of news releases on things that were happening
everywhere, not just Birmingham. And of course they were ignored
by the big press but over a period of time there were things in the
black press, the small press, the student press, and some of the
church publications and you know, a few months later finally there
would be a story in the New York Times . We really worked at that
sort of thing because part of the job then was to get some sort of
attention from the country on what was happening in these places.
And we put out a major pamphlet.
ANDREW MANIS: "People in Motion?"
ANNE BRADEN: No, no, that was later. That was on the history. We
did that in about 1966 .
ANDREW MANIS: "They Strike Segregation at its Core?"
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, the little four page folder, where we called it
the "Johannesburg of North America." That was the first time ever
it was labeled that way, I think . And I donlt even know whether I
got a copy of that. I'm sure there must be one in Wisconsin where
all my stuff is. But we circulated that around the country. So we
were trying to publicize what was happening in Birmingham, partly
as protection. The news is the only protection we had.
would work with him on things like that.
So we
ANDREW MANIS: What were your first impressions of him when you saw
22
the house?
ANNE BRADEN: I don't think I had that hero image that I have now
until I knew him in his historic role. I'm not sure I realized then
how historic what he was doing was . He wasn't the only person.
You had people like that allover the South. People were standing
up allover, so in that sense, he didn't seem so unusual. But I've
always felt real at home with Fred from the beginning. I've always
felt a sort of kindred sort of spirit with Fred. To me he just --
aside from anything political or anything else he's just an easy
person to talk with and be around and I just felt that he's fun.
And a warm person you just feel like you've known him always. Or
I felt that way. I grew up sixty miles from him in Anniston, but
our paths never crossed and never would have except for the civil
rights movement. There was just sort of a kinship. Fred and I
have different prospecti ves on a lot of things, particularly
religion. So it was more like finding this kindred spirit. I
didn't particularly feel any sort of hero thing about him at that
time. But I'm trying to think of a couple of little things that
might interest you.
board meetings.
He got pretty regular at coming to the SCEF
ANDREW MANIS:
that you have.
ANNE BRADEN:
I'll interrupt you and ask you for any anecdotes
There is one that he had totally forgotten.
Birmingham was really scared. People were literally afraid to go
to Birmingham. He let me come down and speak. I almost forgotten
when that was. He had me come to speak to the Alabama Christian
23
movement. I had only met him Monday night. Has he told you about
that? I've heard him tell that story about how he kissed me and
wanted Bull Connor to know he was kissin' a white woman. I can 't
remember that. I have the vaguest memory of it.
ANDREW MANIS: He made a big point to do that for the detectives?
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, but it must have been a regular Monday night
meeting. But the thing I remember that he had forgotten. By this
time it was early sixties and we were in close touch with him
during the late fifties. SCEF had a big conference in Washington
about voting rights. That was one of the things that SCLC had a
big debate about whether to cosponsor. But they ended up doing it.
He was involved in that. But this was wait a minute, l'm
thinking here. The big demonstrations were in 1963. We had a
conference . .
ANDREW MANIS: Freedom rides were in 1961.
ANNE BRADEN: Oh , yeah. I know that. But we had a conference. I
could check the dates in the Patriot. A major conference in 1961
-- it must have been in the spring of 1962. Anyway I have this
vivid memory in my mind of a SCEF board meeting and we were in
Nashville. We were talking about -- and it was always kind of a
major thing, the SCEF board met twice a year. And those meetings
themselves were important because, as I say, it took some courage
to associate with SCEF, so wherever we met, sometimes we would have
some kind of public event . We wouldn I t always, but just an
opportunity to invite people to the meetings and we were trying to
decide where to have the next meeting. Fred was there. He spoke
24
up first and said "Why don't you all corne to Birmingham?" There
was dead silence. Everybody sort of -- finally somebody said
"Well, you know, we haven't met in Atlanta for some time and I
think it might be fine if we have a meeting in Atlanta." Fred was
sort of looking around and somebody said, "Well, another place that
we could go, why don't we meet in New Orleans? " Fred looked
around. All of a sudden he said, "I think ya'll are scared to corne
to Birmingham." (Anne Braden laughs.) I mean, you did not have
interracial meetings in Birmingham. That's all there was to it.
Bull Connor had said that he would arrest anybody in an int erracial
meeting in Birmingham. And he had some people. That's why I can 't
remember when I spoke in that meeting, whether it was before or
after that. But you just didn't. People were scared. He was
right. But nobody wanted to be called a coward, see, so when he
said that everybody started to say we had to go to Birmingham. I
could have two things confused here but I think then that was when
we decided to have the meeting in Birmingham. I remember Herman
Long. Herman was a great person. He ran the race relations
institute and he is vice chair of SCEF. I remember Herman said,
"Fred, where in the world how are you going to deal with this in
Birmingham? Where we gonna sleep? Where we gonna eat?" "Don't
worry about that. Ya'll corne to Birmingham, unless you're scared
to come to Birmingham." So I think that those two things coincided
but I know that we decided to have this conference in connection
with our meeting. The meeting would be one day and the conference
the next or something like that. On "How to Integrate the Deep
25
South," that was the topic of it. That is what we talked about.
There is a brochure somewhere, which indicates that. But it was
waving a red flag. We did. And, let's see, the meetings -- we
stayed at the Gaston . We couldn't stay anyplace but the Gaston.
We weren't even supposed to stay there, if you were whites, you
know, but we did. Other people did too, as time went on, during
the demonstrations, white people did stay at the Gast on . But that
was against the law, too, but there wasn't any other place to stay
so we stayed at the Gaston. Maybe Gaston's building which is near
there. But I will never forget that day we got there. We didn't
know what was going to happen because nobody had had any racial
conference in Birmingham maybe since the Southern Conference -founding
conference. I don't know. Probably in the forties, but
not in the late forties or fifties. People just didn't do that.
The very fact that it was held was precedent-breaking. A lot of
people came because the SNCC people a lot of the people in SNCC
were pretty close to the SCEF people. It turned out to be a very
successful meeting in terms of, not only what was discussed, but in
breaking that pattern that whites and blacks could meet in
Birmingham together. But we got to Birmingham and went t o the
Gaston Motel t o eat lunch. Several of us. I remember Fred walked
in "Oh, I'm glad to see everybody . I'm glad you're here and glad
you're not scared to come to Birmingham." (Anne Braden laughs.)
I remember I said, "Fred, we're scared to death, but we 're here."
It was successful and nobody got arrested. I think that was the
spring of 1962 and it was when it was -- I'll tell you what it was.
26
No, let's see, when was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church,
1962 or 1963?
ANDREW MANIS: 1963.
ANNE BRADEN: After the demonstrations. The big demonstrations
were in the spring of 1963 -- so 1962 is when it was. And then
SCLC had its annual convention in Birmingham the following August
which was also a major event but was after the SCEF thing. But we
never would have gone if he hadn't said "I believe you all are
scared to come to Birmingham."
ANDREW MANIS: Did he have any other significant role in the
conference? Do you r emember a speech he may have made?
ANNE BRADEN: Oh, I'm sure he did. I believe he presided. As I
recall he did. The board met that Friday for a business meeting at
a church -- not Sixteenth Street but another church about a block
away, St. Paul's maybe. That night we had a mass rally -- a public
rally. I can't remember the church, maybe St. Paul's Methodist.
And we had I remember Howard Schomer. He is still living. He was
President of Chicago Theological Seminary. He was kind of a
figure. He came and spoke as sort of a drawing card to people.
We've always had a big mass meeting in Birmingham and I guess this
one was a little scary . Fred presided. He was generally the
leader of the thing. Then there were workshops the next day. He
was visibly the l eader of the whole thing. Apparently, the police
just decided not to take it on, partly because there were so many
people from out of town and it would have caused a problem if they
had tried to arrest all those people. I think it also had an
27
impact on the atmosphere just that you could have that kind of
meeting down there. Then the SCLC convention was in the next few
months. It was after that, that they began building up to the
demonstrations that happened in the spring of 1963. By which time
as you know, Fred had moved from Birmingham. I don't know what he
has told you about it or his decision to move.
ANDREW MANIS: We talked about it today. He went into some detail
about that.
ANNE BRADEN: I don't know how it looks to him now. You know when
he was talking about going, what he said to me was, and I can't
remember now when it was, was it in 1961 or 1962.
ANDREW MANIS: August 1961.
ANNE BRADEN: Of 1961? So that conference we had in 1962 was after
he had moved away from there. But, see, at that point you wouldn't
have known because he was back all the time practically. He was
back every week for the mass meetings. But I know when he decided
to move, you say it was in 1961. That was when Carl was imprisoned
on the HUAC case. I remember sitting around here talking about it.
I was concerned he was leaving. You don't want anybody to leave
somewhere . What he said to me at that time was, he said, and this
is ironic I guess in a way, he said "if I could see any possibility
of anything ever changing in Birmingham, I'd stay, but I don't. I
just don't know how much longer I should put my family through
this. " That's what he said to me. Now I don't know what he is
saying in retrospect.
ANDREW MANIS: Would you consider that a low moment for him? He
28
always came across as so certain and courageous.
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, I think he was discouraged . of course, he
never quit fighting . He kept going back . He continued , I think,
until I don't know how long, as president of the Alabama Christian
movement for some years after that. The movement couldn ' t survive
without him. It was a one man movement --a one man leadership. He
was more worried about his family than himself obviously . Once his
family was out, he was down there most of the time. Apparently,
originally it worked out with that church in Cincinnati. They
agreed to him being gone all the time because they -- of course
later, some of them got kind of testy about it I guess, but in that
period they were proud I guess to have a big civil rights leader
there. But see, he was gone all the time. But it was more his
family -- I mean, the kind of strain they were under for years,
which I think is one of the reasons Ruby died young, course I don't
know the whole story. But she was under terrible strain and the
kids were, too, I mean, it was just constant. It wasn't just one
incident here and there. It was a constant threats they lived
with. And like anybody in that situation, they, not for
themselves, but there is always a guilty feeling about your family.
So I think at that point he said to me that it didn't look like
Birmingham would ever change.
ANDREW MANIS: Very quickly after that, he hit on the idea of SCLC
coming there and doing direct action .
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, they were already involved in some direct
action with SCLC, to focus national attention on it is what the
29
SCLC did.
ANDREW MANIS: From everything I can tell, it was Shuttlesworth's -it
was essentially Fred's idea.
ANNE BRADEN: That they come.
ANDREW MANIS: Even insistence that Martin
ANNE BRADEN: Oh, there's no doubt about that. I think that's
true. I don't think there is anything in King's records that would
contradict that but I've always -- that was always my understanding
of it and I've never seen anything to contradict that. See,
everybody wanted Martin to come. Martin and that was an
unhealthy thing, but it just happened, just like everybody wants
Jesse Jackson now. I guess people need a charismatic leader or
something. But Martin -- there was a terrible strain on him.
People were thinking that if Martin Luther King would come that we
could do all these things. This was people who weren't just
sitting there doing nothing. They were trying to organize, but if
Martin came it was part of it. Not only that, but we'll get
national attention. Maybe more than that. So Birmingham was just
one of many places who wanted Martin Luther King to come. And of
course the students didn't want him to come half the time, the
people in SNCC, but a lot of the local people did. Because it
would focus attention, so that it wasn't unusual or strange that
Fred would think nWhy not Birmingham?" A lot of us, including
Fred, had always had the sense, and it's in that little brochure
"Segregation at Its Core" or whatever it was. Birmingham was sort
of the epitome of the south. If you could crack Birmingham, you
30
could crack the whole south, which I think is the way it worked out
really. Once you did, everything else began to trouble. Really it
~ the key. It was so rigid there and so violent. See,
Birmingham had such a .
ANDREW MANIS: Was that a common perception? Occasionally it
sounds like Shuttlesworth was the first one to figure out that if
you could crack it in Birmingham it would fall apart every place
else.
ANNE BRADEN: Well, we said that a lot and we talked about it at
SCEF about it. It was sort of a collective thing there among Fred
and all of us. Well, I think there was a general feeling that
there are certain places that have symbolic meanings. Mississippi
had that in peoplels minds that way, which was true, too, if you
could crack Mississippi, you could crack any where. For a while,
you know, until the late fifties, people thought Mississippi was
impossible until the early sixties when Bob Moses and some people
began working there, that it was just impossible. So Mississippi,
in a different way, because that was a whole state -- I think there
was a common perception. I don't think it was articulated that
much as what we've said now "that if we could crack Birmingham, we
could crack the whole thing" but everybody or a lot of people
thought of Birmingham as the epitome of racist terror, partly
because of what Fred had been doing and the bombings and all that
and, of course, they tried to start a boycott there. It was a bus
boycott after Montgomery. It never quite came off -- it was just
too big a city to do what you did in Montgomery. But there were
31
all these other things going on that did not start when King came .
The Alabama Christian movement was a real viable organization and
probably the most mass organization that SCLC worked with any
placet indigenous. Not something that just happened when King
went, but you know those Monday night meetings went on long before
King came and masses of people came out and raised money. All of
the money that they spent on court cases -- of course the NAACP
the Legal Fund -- came in and did those things. But they raised
the money at the grass roots.
ANDREW MANIS: Tell me about some of those mass meetings that you
attended if you can sort of narrate what it was like. I've read
the detectives' reports but I'm not completely sure what you have
in mind when you talk about differences on issues like religion
with people like Fred.
what was going on.
So, I'm interested in how you perceived
ANNE BRADEN: Well, my definition, to answer that question first --
I had a conversation with Fred once , and I've thought about it a
lot. We were sitting out here at the airport. I guess I was
taking him to a plane or something. I just remember where we were.
The place isn't important. We had a little time. You rarely had
time to talk philosophic in those days. We got to talking about
the bombing at his house.
ANDREW MANIS: Was this in the sixties?
ANNE BRADEN: It was in the sixties. It was some years after the
bombing. I said, n Fred " And, you see, he always presented
this thing -- he still does. He's gotten it down -- he's told the
32
story so many times. But he always presented it that way, "when
the bomb went off and he was in the bed" and he said the bedpost
went through the wall sort of like that and the impact was so
great and they never found the springs to the bed and he didn't get
a scratch . He always felt that God saved him to lead the people of
Birmingham to freedom. So, we were just sitting there" talking one
day and I said "Fred, I consider myself a religious person but I
have worked out what I believe and we are going in the same
direction, we just believe different things." I said, "I believe
in God, if you can call it God, but is a different concept of God
from what you believe. I don't believe, I guess I conceive as God
as a force in the universe which is the universe and that my
relationship to this as an individual is that I need to get in tune
with that force in the universe but I don't conceive of a God that
reaches out and changes the course of what human beings are doing.
Human beings make a war. I don't think God is going to reach out
and say, save my son or save me. I don't think of God as that sort
of a concept." He sat there listening. He listens to what you
say . He is sharp as he can be. So I said, "It's just beyond my
ken, sort of, I don't conceive of a God that reaches out and saves
you and the house and the bed. People did that horrible thing and
that's just not the kind of God I conceive of." He sat there and
listened and then he said, "Well, how do you explain it?"
(Laughs . ) I didn't have the answer. So that's the only difference
I had with him. No, I think the power of the religious belief is
that, was the motor force of that movement. The mass meetings
33
I didn't go to a lot of them, but there was a cornmon denominator
where -- the difference about Birmingham was they were so regular.
People just came out for years every Monday night. I think the
music was a big part of it and there was always preaching but it
wasn't like Sunday morning preaching -- not like some Sunday
morning preaching because it wasn't just generalities that didn 't
mean anything. People were talking about real things, but it was
the same sort of spiritual kind of force and the people really did
feel that they not only were inspired to action but felt like they
were part of a historic movement that was God's will. There's a
really great speech that I had on tape somewhere that Andy Young
made. And Andy and I don't agree on everything, but he made some
good speeches. And this was a speech he made at the 25th
anniversary of the SCLC. It was in Birmingham -- it must have been
the 20th -- 77 -- the 20th then, anniversary celebration. I taped
his speech and I transcribed it and because he was the main speaker
at the dinner, and because he was in Birmingham, he was talking
about the Birmingham movement, but it's a great description of
and he is a very eloquent sort of speaker -- of that movement. I
thought it was better than -- the way he described it -- if I find
that tape 1111 lend it to you -- the way he described the climax of
how they won in 1963, you know, was much better than the thing on
"Eyes on the Prize." I thought that was the end of the Birmingham
episode but that was kind of anticlimactic. You didn't get that
feeling there that people had of victory which they did, you know.
It wasn't complete, but it sure was for the time being. But he
34
talks about the mass meetings, he talked actually, what's the guy's
name who is the musician in Birmingham, he's still there . He sings
and led the singing in those days. He s till comes and leads the
s inging .
ANDREW MANIS: Carlton Reece?
ANNE BRADEN: Carlton Reece. Have you heard him?
ANDREW MANIS: He will be at Fred's church next week.
ANNE BRADEN: He ' s great . I never heard him anyplace but
Birmingham so I don ' t know how he'd sound, but he's just great.
But Andy said -- he was talking about how Birmingham changed the
course of history but he said that - - well, he started out talking
about Carlton Reece and he said "You know, we have these meetings
and Fred would get up and preach and Martin would get up and
preach . They didn't let me preach in those days " because he was
such a young minister. But he said, "They would preach the wall
down and the n they would issue the call for people that wanted to
go to jail the next day. Nobody wanted to go to jail. People
forget, people weren ' t anxious to go to jail. Sometimes the kids
were but nobody would respond . But then Carlton Reece would begin
to play and it was like we were lifted up and people would corne
f orth and volunteer to go to jail the next day." Then he described
the day that -- this is what I remember what he said --I think it
was Easter Sunday . It was the day that the people marched and they
turned the fire hose on them. Andy telling about it describes that
-- he said that "That Sunday they were going t o march down to the
jail because the young people were already in jail" and he said --
35
they were trying to get people out of churches to march down there
and finally people would come out and then they put the fire hose
to us -- he was scared because he said "I knew what those fire
hoses could do. II And he said lithe other thing was that was not our
usual marching crowd." He said, "Those people were dressed up in
their Sunday go to meeting clothes and they didn't want to get all
those clothes wet with the fire hoses." He said, "I was Tomin'."
This was twenty years later. And so, you know "Please, Mr. Mayor,
we're just going to march down there. We're coming right back.
We're just going to the jail and we're coming right back." And
then he said, and so they knelt down to pray, "and then this woman
got up and said 'God is with this movement -- we're going to the
jail. ' Everybody got up and marched toward the jail and they
pulled out the fire hoses and when we looked around there wasn 't
any water coming from the fire hoses. It was corning from the eyes
of those firemen." He said, "That was the moment I knew that
Birmingham had been going nonviolently to its knees and the people
of this county bowed in tribute to the great souls of this city and
we began to see the transformation of our nation." That I s Andy and
his flowery language. I saw Andy recently and I quoted him and he
said "Send me a copy of that." But it was much better than the way
it carne across on Eyes on the Prize. There was such a spirit and
people felt like they were doing God's will.
ANDREW MANIS: Tell me at what point you were with Shuttlesworth at
a significant place along the way, from the time you met him and
until 1968.
36
ANNE BRADEN: Well, it was in meetings and stuff. Now I wasn ' t
down there during the big demonstrations. See, I stayed away from
there deliberately . You got to understand. My name was such a
fire word . That wasn't going to happen at that point . I didn ' t go
to Mississippi for the summer of 1964 for the same reason. I wrote
an article about that for Southern Exposure a few years ago. Fred
never told me to stay out of Birmingham. Some of the SNCC people
said "you can help us most by staying away this summer." Looking
back on it, I guess you sort of red-bait yourself but I think that
was just ammunition in the hands of the enemy, so we helped in
other ways. But I'd see him at meetings and various SCEF things he
was at pretty constantly. I am certain he has told you about the
whole hassle with the NAACP and to a certain extent of the SCLC and
when he became president of SCEF . Has he told you that story?
ANDREW MANIS : No, he hasn't.
ANNE BRADEN: He enjoys telling it really, so you ought to hear his
version. He was very active on the SCEF Board and so in 1963,
Aubrey Williams had been president of SCEF for some years. Then he
retired and became President Emeritus and began to spend more of
his time at the National Committee to Abolish HUAC. So we elected
Bishop Love who was a black Methodist minister based up in
Maryland. He served a couple of years. I don't know what happened
to him. He stayed on the board but he didn't want to be president
any more . Anyway, in 1963, -- incidentally, you asked me about the
background of SCEF and I told you about how Jim figured out that
was the whole -- from 1948 to 1963 SCEF'S program was basically the
37
single point program of fighting segregation. We carne into it in
those early years, and it changed in 1963. We had a meeting which
Fred carne to. I think he was president by then. We elected Fred
as president in the spring of 1963. We met in Norfolk, Virginia
and had a board meeting there and elected officers and made him
president. 1111 corne back to the hassle later. It was soon after
that we met in New Orleans. Fred came. Jim was there and Carl and
me, which was (the) staff. Ella Baker who was working, that I s
another story, but she was working closely with SCEF. She resisted
that communist scare, too, but she was close to Fred. In fact when
I got to know Ella, well, I met her in Fred Shuttlesworth I s
kitchen. They called me one day. It was in 1958 or 1959, planning
the voter registration drive and she was very close to Fred. We
had a meeting and talked about what we would do in terms of our
program with SCEF at that point and realized it was our
assessment and I think history proved us right but we were entering
a new period of history. This was 1963. Segregation in public
accommodations, that battle was essentially won by then. It wasnlt
written into law until 1964. But it was won on the streets.
Things were breaking down. Voting rights were gonna be won. The
black movement was moving on to economic issues because things
began to get -- people were saying in Texas -- people were saying
the same thing in North Carolina rrWhat good is it to be able to sit
at the 1 unch counter when you don I t have enough money to buy a
hamburger? II People were saying these things and raising those
issues and people were forming the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union
38
in Mississippi and there was, you know, turning to economic issues.
So we decided that we were at a stage where we were clearing away
the debris and, you know, that we would begin to talk about basic
issues such as economic and social justice, which you had not been
able to do because it was a police state. We developed a ten-point
program with different issues that SCEF would work on which were
mostly related to economics and also to world peace. We got into
the whole peace and civil rights thing as the sixties went on in
the viet Nam war. But it was really a return to the Southern
Conference of Human Welfare because we had said that we were at a
different stage and as the sixties evolved, that's what SCEF was
doing more. Especially after SNCC told all the white people to go
organize, whites, a lot of them came to SCEF. We set up projects
to organize whites and blacks and Fred was president of SCEF during
that period.
ANDREW MANIS: Can you summarize basically what his responsibilities
were as president?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, he was a pretty active president and he stayed
in close touch with things. SCEF, like most organizations I guess,
well, certainly one that operates over a region, the staff day to
day ran the organization and we did the work and, see, Jim, well,
we didn't really have that much staff. We didn't have a lot of
money and we weren't that kind of organization. Most of the times
Carl and I were about the only staff -- it was Jim Dombrowski in
New Orleans and Carl and me here after we made a move to
Louisville, but we traveled throughout the South. Our job was
39
traveling, basically, from 1957 until 1966. We were field
secretaries so we were out allover the South and I was editing the
Southern Patriot. Ella came on part time on the staff. She came
to work with us. So she worked part time and John Saulter part
time. A white guy -- actually native American but he hadn't
claimed that heritage then. But that's all the staff we had. It
grew a lot in the late sixties. You had a board by then of about
maybe fifty people and an advisory committee which was really a way
to get people to lend their names. And then there were the
officers that we kept in real close touch with as different things
would come up. And Fred, we were always in real close touch with
something he needed to take a position on or something that needed
to be done. We were in constant touch with him but he didn't have
any day-to-day responsibilities. That was the staff. But he was
giving leadership in terms of direction and raising the right
questions. But when he was first elected in the spring of 1963 and
I was (unintelligible) then. And I didn't know some of this until
later. We knew he would be under attack. But the way he tells
this -- he'll tell you about it at some point later on . Actually
I think he was in Jackson, Mississippi, for something and he was
coming to Birmingham. Glouster Current, of the NAACP National
Office and Director of Branches and had been since the fifties, and
Glouster made it his business in life to make sure there were no
communists in the NAACP, but the NAACP had a rather ambiguous role
because they were seen as a much more conservative force than the
SCLC and SNCC and some of the action groups, but they were doing a
40
lot of legal work and they had been treated unfairly by history in
a way because of the places where the NAACP youth groups were
leading the sit-ins, the lines crossed, but they were handling a
lot of Fred's legal cases. Because there were many of them. I
remember doing news releases, but I'm terrible on remembering
figures and statistics but some ridiculous number of charges that
we had against him all at once plus all the cases he filed. They
were into court stuff a lot in Alabama. There was a mass movement,
but it was legal, too. They were always filing some kind of court
suit, but the NAACP was handling most of these for them. Roy
Wilkins was the Director of NAACP. So he was pretty dependent on
them for legal help because, of course, they were raising money all
the time at these mass meetings. There weren't that many lawyers
to hire in Birmingham. So they needed help. But, anyway, he was
in Jackson, and the way he tells the story, at Jackson they got on
the plane . I don't know whether he was with Glouster Current or if
they both happen to have got on the same plane. But in the Jackson
News they had a big banner headline "Negro Preacher Heads Communist
Front Group . n So Glouster Current said "What's gain' on?" "Well,"
(Fred) said, "I've been elected President of SCEF." "Oh, well, you
better get out of that." So Fred says when he got to Birmingham,
he and Glouster got off and said "We better talk to Roy." He
called up Roy Wilkins and told him about this article in the paper.
So then he said "Put Fred on the phone." So Fred got on the phone
and he says, "Yeah, I guess you've heard, I was elected president
of the Southern Conference and I've accepted. II And he said, "Now,
41
I understand maybe that may cause you some probl ems , and __ II Oh,
yeah, the way he starts off - - Fred - - when he tells the story
well, the first thing Fred said to ROy was "How's my neck? II So
whenever he talked to the NAACP, he always asked "How's my neck?"
So, he said, "Well, if you all feel like you can't represent me any
more, well, that's just -- I ' l l have to find some other legal help
or something. " Roy says, "Oh, no, no, no, Fred, don ' t worry about
that. Don't worry about t hat." They needed Fred worse t han he
needed them if you want to know the truth about it . So that
settled that and Glouster Current went on back to New York and
wasn ' t ever heard from any more on that question. But then the
other story he tells is that he was actually in Louisville . That
was a coincidence, but it was just where it happened. They went on
a tour . This was in 1963. He was elected president of SCEF and
that's when the big things were in Birmingham. Birmingham was big
news . After they sort of settled things in Birmingham there was a
big speaking tour and they carne. Martin, Fred, Ralph Abernathy,
Wyatt Walker -- and there was a big rally here and everywhere .
People were using t he Birmingham thing to stimulate t he local
movements. I did not know about this until years later that Fred
said that he was riding in -- I guess maybe they just met -- first
time he had seen Marti n -- I guess since he had been elected
president of SCEF because it just happened in May. But it was
after the big things in Birmingham. And then I think it was Fred
and Ralph in the car riding into town from the airport or
something. The way he tells the story -- the way I first heard him
42
tell it he has modified it from the first way he told it -- he
decided to tell about this because he knew he was going to be
making some problems. So, he says, "Martin, there's one thing I've
been wanting to tell you. I've been elected president of SCEF and
I've accepted. Now I understand that might cause some problems
wi th SCLC (because he was secretary of SCLC at that time) -- I
understand it might cause some problems for SCLC. If you think it
will do that, I'll resign from SCLC. That is how I heard him tell
the story. He changed ita little later. II No , no, that's all
right, we don't think you should resign.!! However, I think they
shut him out a lot after that.
reason. I think that for some
secretary of SCLC for a long time.
I don't know whether that's the
reason they did. He stayed
But even today, SCLC will have
a convention and they will play Fred up like a lot of other people
who are doing less today than Fred is. Something happened along in
there. I don't know that there's a connection. There wouldn't
have been on Martin's part because he had come through all that
with SCEF. And because he is long gone, and whether Dr. (Joseph)
Lowery, -- I don't know. There are other things I am sure he has
told you because he got in a terrible hassle with Martin at the end
of Birmingham.
ANDREW MANIS: Do you think it was that?
ANNE BRADEN: That hassle?
ANDREW MANIS: That particular exchange of words?
ANNE BRADEN: Oh, it's just hard to say. I don't -- Martin never
impressed me as one to hold a grudge.
43
ANDREW MANIS: Not Martin, per se, but some .
ANNE BRADEN: But some of the other people around him. Something!
Maybe they saw Fred as too uncontrollable, a maverick. He was, you
know, he wasn't one of these kind that you could tell him what to
do. At that point, the whole Birmingham struggle really built SCLC
up. SCLC had its ups and downs and they'd just had a real defeat
in Albany, Georgia, whether they called it that or not, it was. We
didn't call it that either in the Patriot at the time, but,
looking back on it, it was. They needed a victory and that sort of
thing and it was so that they certainly needed Fred, but it was
mutual. So I really don't know. I have never understood it.
ANDREW MANIS: You certainly -- you seem to anyway, unless you're
close enough as at some point or another, I will be, after I've
investigated all of this, close enough to see what local things he
has done in the Cincinnati area perhaps. It does seem as if he was
removed or was being no longer in the limelight significantly after
1963. Is that fair?
ANNE BRADEN: In the limelight where? Birmingham? Nationally?
SCLC? Or what?
ANDREW MANIS: Nationally. Well, just as you mentioned where, for
example, SCLC doesn't seem to give him as much attention as the
others you mentioned while ago. They give more attention to some
who haven't been doing as much as Fred has. Maybe you could
elaborate on that?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, I don't know. That is almost putting it more
extremely than is fair because some of those people -- we're
44
talking about today -- a lot of people think SCLC is dead, which it
really isn't. It's had a lot of life in the last decade and it
still does. It has put a lot of strength in Alabama and some other
places in the Deep South and still it has a tremendous amount of
prestige, I find, with grass roots people which is the same sort of
thing when people struggled for SCLC to come in. The name has
magic. It hasn't had much money for years. I am trying to look
back at when Fred didn't have prominence after 1963. It's hard to
know how much to attribute to the press . The press decides who
they are going to play up and, in a sense, course the press dropped
the civil rights movement back in the mid-sixties, too. They
didn't pay the same attention to it. So it is hard to pinpoint a
moment in time. I don't even remember when he quit being secretary
of SCLC. It's not any time like -- the convention. NOw, I don't
know if Fred was there this last time in Washington. They are
always having him to do something.
ANDREW MAN! S : Let me ask you, have you observed his personality
and his activism change over the years?
ANNE BRADEN: I haven't really seen any change.
ANDREW MANIS: ??
ANNE BRADEN: I would say it has. I've never been clear on exactly
what his role has been in Cincinnati because I don't spend any time
in Cincinnati, even though it is close. I know people there but
its just somewhere ?? ?? work. But I 1 know he has tried to be
active in a number of things there. He has told me about different
things how they had a thing about the utility rates. He spent
45
a lot of time building a church. Then there was a big split in the
church and he built another one. He built it with people, but
mainly, he built another church. He spent a lot of time on the
c hurch. But he has been involved in different things there . I
know some things that I have suggested people go to see him about.
He hasn't necessaril y responded to -- he has always opened up his
church for whatever is going on in the organized anti- Klan network
a nd the march at Greensboro . See, down through the years he has
still done what he did in the sixties. He will do things that
other people won ' t, like that Greensboro thing . Remember the
Greensboro massacre when they shot people down in the s t reets.
Some of us were from the anti- Klan Network which had just started,
which Fred hadn't been that much involved in. C. T. Vivian had
called the initial meeting to form that thing. Then when that
thing that happened in Greensboro -- the people were so afraid in
Greensboro . It was really ridiculous. So we were trying to find
a way to break through the fear. Dr. Lowery, I don ' t want to get
in a position of criticizing him, because I have a lot of r espect
for Dr . Lowery in recent years. He was having a time deciding
whether to get involved in the Greensboro thing. SCLC was sort of
"on- again off-again . " They finally did come into it. The coalition
had a big march of about 10,000 people on February 2, 1980 . But in
the Fall, or maybe it was in January because they put that march up
six weeks . But it was in the early stages and we were trying to
have a press conference in Greensboro with some sort of clout to
announce we were really going to do this and to really encourage
46
people who wanted to speak out but were scared. We, at that point,
did not have the SCLC firm. I remember I called Fred to see if he
would come. He came immediately and he knew his role right then.
I told him we were having trouble as to whether the SCLC was really
going to support it. He said, "Well, if I come, they'll have to.
They wouldn't want me to be out front without them. II So he came at
his own expense. There have been other instances like that down
through the years. When you needed somebody that would stick their
neck out -- like in the Eddie Carthon's case (tape interruption)
civil rights movement as far as the news media and mass media was
concerned after the mid-sixties. I had a whole theory about what
happened to the civil rights movement, which isn't about what you
are writing about so much, but it didn't just sort of dissipate.
There was a massive war against the movement in the late sixties.
A lot of people don't realize that, especially white people,
because it was mainly against blacks. It was just horrendous in
terms of people being put in jail by organizers. I was traveling
in the South. You couldn't go into any community where all black
I
organizers weren't either in jailor on the way or just out because
they raised a lot of hell. And so that was that. And then there
was the fact that it wasn't news any more or it was the kind of
news they didn't want to print and even in Birmingham, there were
continuing struggles there, especially around the police. That is
why Arrington got elected, but even before Arrington, and Fred was
involved in all that because he was coming back a lot during that
period. Various police brutality things going on, demonstrations,
47
in the late sixties, weren't covered in the press at all. I
remember when, though I do not remember who told me this, but
somebody who had talked to a reporter from one of the major papers
in Chicago, Sun Times, or one of the major papers, who was down
there and said that he had been told by his editor "unless 500
people are arrested or somebody is killed, don't even call us."
Now they had decided it wasn't news any more. And not only decided
it wasn 't news, I think that the media is part of the
Establishment, and they did do a lot to build up the movement, but
they were not going to continue to do it . They're not going to do
it for us now. So, my point is, it wasn't just Fred being
eclipsed. It was a general thing and a lot of people. You didn't
hear that much about Ralph Abernathy. You didn't hear that much
about C. T. Vivian for a long time. So, I don 't know whether there
is something different in Fred I s case. I think it's more the
question as to why he seemed to not have the prominence within SCLC
as time went on. I don't really know the answer to that. There
was a lot of struggle in SCLC about who was going to inherit the
mantle, and all that and then when Dr. Lowery became president he
did a lot to revitalize it .
ANDREW MANIS: Let me ask you to -- I'm the kind of person who
figures everybody's got an ego -- and, if you'd listen, depending
how you interpret what you hear while you talk to Shuttlesworth,
you hear him speak about his role in ways that sound egotistical -I
don't mean that in a judgmental way but just as a matter of fact.
Do you think he ever feels any sense --felt any sense of
48
competition with, o r feels any sense of jealousy, about the way the
country looks at King versus his own role. What kind of a
relationship did they have at the points that you were able to
observe them?
ANNE BRADEN: I 'm -- to get to your first question first, just in
talking with Fred, I've never particularly sensed that he was
jealous or felt that he should have been the great person instead
of King. I never felt that with him. In fact I don't think I felt
that with any of the people who were close to King. I don't know
why. Maybe it was there and I didn 't see it or they just covered
it up. I remember back in the earlier days Ralph Abernathy, I
remember talking to him at some point and a question came up that
he might be being neglected a little bit, but that was a long long
time ago and I never heard Fred ever intimate anything like that.
I think whatever ego needs Fred had, and everybody does have them,
and he does have a strong ego . I mean, you take, you know you
couldn 't buck the system. It took somebody like Fred. You got to
have a strong ego. In fact, people run around saying Jesse Jackson
is an egomaniac. Well, you're not going to run for president of
the United States unless you've got a strong ego, but they don't
say these other candidates are egomaniacs. So he did have that and
has it I guess, although I never got the feeling even after he
moved to Cincinnati because he's not the great hero that much any
more, that he felt like a has-been or -- I never got that feeling.
I mean, he's worked hard to build his church in Cincinnati, but has
gone back to Birmingham. So at one time he wasn't recognized in
49
Birmingham as much as he obviously should be with his role in
history and so forth, although everybody knew him. Any time he
went back a big crowd would come out to hear him but there wasn't
a lot of public recognition and the organization I work with now,
soc (Southern organizing Committee), really did the first thing to
recognize Fred publicly, and we wanted that to happen. It was our
idea. We decided that the Southern Organizing Committee for Social
Justice is a group a bunch of us founded after SCEF broke up in the
mid-seventies. Has its headquarters in Birmingham and is a
Southwide network now and Fred's been a part of it. He has been on
the board. We decided along in, I don't remember what year, it's
in a file upstairs, but it was in the latter part of the seventies
1977 or 1978 -- to have a big thing in Birmingham honoring Fred
because nobody had really done that up to that point. That was
what -- fifteen years after the climax of the movement, though, as
I said, he went back very regularly for those demonstrations in the
late sixties. But there had never been anything at that point.
Now that was probably ten years ago that we did that and at that
point, it was just fifteen years away from 1963, although, people
in a way, knew what Birmingham does for all the folks who come out
and stuff like that and just somebody that hadn't sort of written
any history of what he had really done. So we decided
(interference) and he had at this thing "An Evening Gathering in
Sixteenth Street Church -- A Tribute to Fred." We worked on it for
some months. We got together and made sure we covered all the
bases and had all the people there that were the various factions
50
of what happened. There was some jealousy of him there, I think.
We ran into that then. And when we were organizing that, I think
that maybe some of the people that were then in ostensibly the
Alabama Christian movement, which I don't think amounted to that
much any more but the name was there, but SCLC was a more viable
organization at that time. One of the people connected with that
didn't -- sort of dragged his heels, wasn't in particular favor of
us. But anyway we had Ossie Davis corne, you know, just sort of a
drawing card because we weren't sure what response we'd get. And
the other people -- we tried to get Coretta, but we couldn't
Coretta King, but Martin Luther King, III, came to speak. C. T.
Vivian. There was a big turnout. Somebody connected with SOC went
to the Birmingham City Council, and Arrington was on the city
council then (it was before he was elected mayor) and asked them to
declare the day "Fred Shuttlesworth Day." Arrington made a motion
and they agreed to do that. So it was quite successful. But that
was the first time that he was publicly honored in Birmingham.
Then within a year, one of the universities there had something,
some sort of a shindig or conference honoring him. Since then
there have been a series of things. Most recently they named a
street for him. But it took a while for that to happen, which
didn't surprise us. Maybe it surprised us that it happened this
soon. But to get back to your question, -- oh, I was going to say,
he wanted that to happen. I know, we went up, a couple of people,
drove up to Cincinnati to talk to him about it and make plans for
this thing. He was pleased about it and, it met with his approval
51
and then there was a little hassle about ?? he definitely wanted us
to go ahead with it, but that doesn't show any inordinate ego. Any
human being would like for people to recognize that they did do
something. I never got a feeling that he was jealous of Martin.
He was critical of Martin on different things, and so was I -- but
not a like of people that attacked Martin so when he was alive. He
would disagree with him on different things. But, you know, maybe
its there and I'm not aware of it. But I don't think it is
anything that's been eating at him, or we'd all know it. He was
always sort of matter-of- fact about Martin. I think he -- frankly
I can't tell you what their relationship was. I never saw them
that much together. I wasn ' t on the SCLC Board or anything where
they would necessarily be in a lot of discussion together . He
certainly didn't hero worship Martin. He had respect just like any
other coworker . In those days, nobody was treating Martin like a
God. He's been put up on a pedestal since, not then.
course, a lot of people were attacking him . Fred never did that.
He would criticize him . And I guess the story was told about when
Martin was ready to settle the things down there .
ANDREW MANIS: Other than that, do you know of others?
ANNE BRADEN: Of the times when they clashed. I don't, but I'm
sure there may have been. I don't know if it was bitter but it was
vehement because Fred was mad, this was his movement. He told me
one time that he disagreed with them in SCLC about the whole thing
of going North to Chicago. He thought that was a mistake. He
argued about that. He said we needed to stay here and integrate
52
the south and not get diverted to the north. He opposed that but
they did it. He thinks that weakened them and they missed the
moment when they could have been pushing ahead in the South. I've
heard him say that. In fact I think he said that as I quoted him.
I did an interview with him for the Southern Exposure a few years
ago on the school thing. Have you seen that?
ANDREW MANIS: Yes.
ANNE BRADEN: That's when he said that. I think that that' s in
that interview. But, I know the other thing I was going to tell
you about what Fred 's sort of leadership he gave which fits him
with the general resistance with the red scare. When Carl was
going to prison for contempt on the House Unamerican Committee.
See, that's where Martin really came through, one of the places, on
that issue. The House Unamerican Committee went to Atlanta in 1958
and subpoenaed Carl, and me, too, but my subpoena was postponed
with a bunch of other people for various things related to civil
rights and Carl, in essence, told them to go to hell. He told him
so many times. He told them to go back to Washington and he was
ci ted for contempt technical to the First Amendment. I was
thankful. liMy beliefs and associations are none of the business of
this committee. " That's what he told them . So in 1961 he ended up
going to jail. Because him and Frank Wilkinson were leading a
fight to abolish HUAC at that point and had come to Atlanta for the
hearings and was also subpoenaed so Frank and Carl went to jail
together in the spring of 1961 which was three years later after
the Supreme Court split five to four on their cases. When it was
53
clear Carl was going to jail, you know, we were constantly trying
to inform people about the whole issue of how this anticommunist
sort of hysteria was used to divide the movement and the role of
HUAC just gave us an opportunity to do it . So we set about to use
the fact that Carl was in jail to get more people to thinking about
the issue. That is the way we survived all those years. We
learned to its an art and we used it in a lot of things . I
learned to use every attack as a platform to reach more people who
never heard about your positions otherwise. It really worked. Not
just for us but for other cases we thought about and everything
because if you approach things that way then they can't win and you
can't lose because if they leave you alone you can just go right on
organizing and doing what you want to do. If they attack you, you
use that as a platform to organize more people. So that is what we
were going to do with that case so the Supreme Court decision was
in February upholding Carl's conviction . Then there was a delay
but he went to prison actually in May. I was in California on a
fundraising trip I think for SCEF the day that the decision came
down (drops microphone -- cannot hear) so while we were in Atlanta
- - but one of the things we would do would be to start a clemency
petition for Carl - - not that we were going to get clemency but
that was a method of protest. So I think I talked to Fred about it
first because Fred was president of SCEF and he thought it was a
good idea and that we would get key leaders, black and white to
initiate this petition and then we would get other people to sign -
- get the names that would allay people's fears. People were
54
really afraid to challenge HUAC. You just didn't challenge HUAC,
like you didn't challenge J. Edgar Hoover. So while I was in
Atlanta I called up Martin and he happened to be home. And he said
"Come out." I was in fairly close touch. I was never really that
close to them, him and Coretta -- much more than later after he got
to be such a world figure. I never tried to contact him that much
but in those days he wasn't quite what he was later. Carl and I
would sometimes stay at their house when we were in Atlanta. So I
had a little bit of a relationship. I wouldn't say it was real
close but at least I could call him up. So I thought if he knew
about the decision, so I thought I would go out to see him. So I
went out to the house. Martin was really a nice person. He was
being very solicitous about my husband going to jail and things
like that and what could he do and things like that. I said,
"Well, there is something, Martin, I want you to initiate a
clemency petition for Carl as a method of protest." He kind of
chuckled. I said, "I'm asking you to do it because you're the only
person in the south that can do it and get by with it. If you sign
it then other people will." He laughed and said, "Don't you know
they call me a communist, too?" I said, "Yeah, but nobody believes
it." So he said, "Well, he'd think about it." So we talked a
little bit more and I left. I told him I would call him the next
week. I called back. Well, I couldn't get him. He was busy.
That was right when the freedom rides were happening. No, no, I'm
sorry, it was before that. The Freedom Rides started in May. So
I was talking to Fred constantly about it because Martin was going
55
to sign it and Fred was going to sign it and we got a number of
people. Fred said we should get it started before Carl was
surrendered, which was going to be in May. (Unintelligible.) So
we established a deadline on getting it going. I remember I was
talking to Fred on the phone one day and we had a number of people
ready to sign but we never could get Martin back. He said, "Now,
Anne, we just got to go ahead with this thing.
longer on Martin. 1111 tell you about Martin.
We can!t wait any
It just takes so
long for Martin to get up that mountain of deci sion on anything."
He said, "Carl will be out of prison before we get this thing
going. Just forget about Martin." (Anne Braden laughs). So he
had respect for Martin and considered him a friend, you know, but
he was just another person. Martin wasnlt on a pedestal then. He
was just one more person. But Martin did come through. That has
nothing to do with Fred. I thought about that a lot, because there
was really nothing in that for Martin . He caught a lot of hell
about it, too, because the minute we publicized it, the press, of
course, called him immediately, and he made a real strong
statement. He didn I t get anything out of that except a lot of
hell. And he did it on principle, basically he did that for
principle. A lot of people were saying he was an opportunist and
he was just looking out for himself and compromising this, that or
the other. Well, he did compromise on things like the Pettus
Bridge and all that, but Martin didnlt want anybody to dislike him.
That was one of his problems. But I never believed any of this
stuff about him just doing things for his own advantage, on that
56
basis if nothing else because there wasn ' t anything in that for
him. And what happened was that I finally called Fred, said that,
I thought I guess I better go ahead. So I decided to try him once
more . It was a Saturday morning. It was the one time I ever tried
to call Martin Luther King that I had a sixth sense that he was
really there but he wouldn't come to the phone because she said he
was not there . I wouldn't accuse Coretta of a lie but I think he
was there. I just had that feeling. Maybe it was the tone of her
voice. She wasn ' t hostile. So I told myself "I guess Fred's
right. He's just not going to do this. He just can't bring himself
to that point. We'll get him to do something else later" which has
always been my philosophy . If you won't do something now, you'll
do something else later. The next morning, Sunday morning, early,
because it was before we went to church, around 8:00 O'clock in the
morning, the phone rang. It was Martin. He said, liAnne, I've been
praying about this thing, the petition. I want you to put my name
on it. II And I expect he had (been praying) I maybe not all night. So
he did.
ANDREW MAN I S : Just a couple more questions before we both fall
over. What, if any, critical, negatively critical things, have you
heard other people in the movement say about Shuttlesworth?
ANNE BRADEN: Let's see. (Long pause.) I'm sure there were some.
A lot of the younger people in SNCC who were very critical of
Martin, liked Fred a lot. They saw a difference between Fred and
Martin . But I think they were un just to Martin in some ways
because they would, - - and you know, they had a point, they would
57
say that the SNCC people would go in and do all the work, then
Martin came and got all the publicity and then left . Well, he
couldn't help that. He was wanted in a thousand places. That was
one of the things that they jumped on him about, that he wouldn't
stay in a place, that SCLC didn't . That wasn't their way of
operating . And most of the people who were critical of Martin were
very friendly to Fred because I think they felt like Fred had dug
in somewhere and worked with people. And nobody -- I've never
heard anybody criticize Fred for moving to Cincinnati. Now maybe
people did, but I never heard it. Because, in a way, I don ' t think
people were even aware he was gone. He came back so much for one
thing. But I never heard anybody be critical there, although the
younger people were critical of Martin a lot . Part of it was
money. SNCC was doing so much of the work and people in the early
days at least, they didn't have fundraising and the people would
read in the paper about the beautiful brave students, and then
write a check to SCLC. But those people really admired Fred
Shuttlesworth. I think he had more respect from the younger people
in the movement than King did or Abernathy or others in SCLC
because they admired his courage. So I am trying to think.
ANDREW MANIS: Physical kind or the moral kind or both?
ANNE BRADEN: I think they thought more in terms of the physical
kind. I don't think t hey thought one way or the other on the
other. But just the fact that he was backing Birmingham, people
respected that. And the fact that he stayed there and in the
consciousness of most people he did stay there. He moved his
58
family and his base to Cincinnati but he was still in Birmingham
fighting. So, I don't know. I guess, well, by the time he was
real active as president of SCEF, and our board and staff began to
grow, and a lot of people came into SCEF. Some of them were
critical of Fred. They thought he ran the meetings with an iron
hand and that he was sort of a dictator.
ANDREW MANIS: Do you think he was?
ANNE BRADEN: Well, I don't know internally about the Birmingham
movement because I wasn't there. I wasn't a part of that movement.
I think that he probably made the basic decisions in that movement.
As far as what they were talking about in SCEF, I think it was a
phoney issue in a way. He would preside in a meeting. You know,
he was used to getting through a meeting and getting it done. I'll
tell you some of these people would want to sit around all night
and talk about things. That just wasn't Fred's way of operating.
So, part of it was style.
my impression of Fred
SCEF eventually broke up.
I think it was a little unfair in that
well, he and I had a disagreement when
That is a whole different story. But
different theories ?? I had my theories. I think the government
had its hand in it but we didn't know that at the time but the
problem was that at one time we had acquired this big staff for
SCEF. We attracted all these whites really who didn't know where
to go. Some of them were pretty good. Some weren 't. The
organization was nearly being run by the staff. The board was
irrelevant. I tried to repair that at one point, and Fred went
along with it at the time, and we merged the board and staff. He
59
said later and I think he still says this, that was the reason SCEF
broke up and that once we decided that everybody's equal, that was
going to destroy the organization. I said, "Fred, I thought we
believed in equality?" "Well, you can't decide everybody's equal."
So verbally you have these things he says that you can interpret as
being anti-democratic. But in life it doesn't really work out that
way. One thing that has really impressed me about Fred is that,
you know, for somebody who really did have a good bit of acclaim,
you know, in a certain area, pretty young, and in a certain milieu,
and around certain specific issues, Fred has constantly grown with
the times, I think, in his thinking and moved on to what the
current issues are. He doesn't live in the past. He'll talk about
it but anyone likes to talk about it. I don't think Fred really
lives in the past, unless you are interviewing him about the past.
He is aware of what ' s going on now. He is really just as sharp as
he can be about everything current . Maybe his experience with SCEF
possibly influenced him in terms -- I ' ve watched him in meetings in
soc now, and he really does listen to other people. A dictator
doesn't and Baptist preachers often don't. But I think that,
probably came out of his experience with SCEF, especially when
there were a lot of, when we were super democratic. He did learn
to listen. He might say things like, "You can't make everybody
equal," but he was listening to the younger people.
ANDREW MANIS: Give me a few examples where you perceive that his
vision has broadened with the times.
ANNE BRADEN: Well, through the years, we can go back to some in
60
the past and some now because, for one thing, his willingness to
associate with us when a lot of people would not. You should ask
him how he saw that. I never have. But when he first met us he
was bound to know we were dangerous. Now later, he developed a
respect for us and how we worked . But I don't know what he thought
about us in the beginning . I ' ve never asked him that. You might
ask him . But apparently, he sure wasn't afraid of us and I think
that he probably, as I say, you should see what he says, my gut
feeling is that some of it was a gut feeling on his part. I think,
because of the way things in the South were then, that you know any
white person that is going to stand up against the system, is going
to be under attack. Well, he expected to be under attack. So
maybe it wasn ' t that shocking. But he also knew it was dangerous .
That was partly a gut reaction . I think he figured we were on his
side and if he could fight Bull Connor he wasn't going to let
people to tell him to associate with. But that's my surmise. You
can ask him. But he went on from there . It wasn't theoretical
from the beginning . Now I think with Martin -- I think there was
a certain sort of a solidarity thing -- you don I t desert your
friends if they're under attack . But I think Martin was cerebral
and thought things out intellectually and I think that he decided
that it was a matter of important principle to fight HUAC and what
it was doing, that kind of thing, more theoretically probably than
Fred in the beginning but maybe after corning into the association
with us from a gut level thing, he did do a lot of thinking about
it and about what we called a plan and he thought about it too, of
61
the relationship with civil liberties and civil rights, that you
couldn't separate them. That's the way we used to put it. And you
can't have civil rights unless you have freedom of speech and all
these people that are trying to control what people think is, you
know, attacking. We talked about it a lot. I think its a misnomer
now, looking back at it. There were a lot of pamphlets about it.
What we were talking about wasn't really -- it wasn't the way civil
liberties -- really what we were talking about was the sickness of
mindless sort of anticommunism. But Fred still talks about his
relationship with civil rights and civil liberties. Like you said,
he was a Baptist preacher in Alabama -- he didn't take a course in
consti tutional law somewhere. But he saw it in life and he
internalized what that issue was about and he made speeches about
it. Same thing on the Viet Nam War. When that came along there
was a big debate in SCEF about whether we would take a position on
the war. The board, Martin came out against it in 1964 or 1965.
We didn't when it first came up. It was probably Fall of 1965. It
was right after that that SCLC took a position and then we did. We
adopted a resolution that we would encourage debate about the war
and so we set up a program called "Operation Open Debate." But
this whole thing about not mixing civil rights and other things, I
didn't agree with that. And I think we could have won the vote at
our first meeting to come out against the war but we didn't push it
because it would have split the organization. Fred hadn't really
thought about that. I can't remember. It was possible he wasn't at
that meeting. I don't have any vivid memory of him being a part of
62
that debate. I'm not sure but it went on and on and I think that
he, like a lot of people, for instance, they had to do a lot of
rethinking, but pretty soon he came to a strong position against
it. So those are things from the past and since then -- well this
is a little diversion, but let me tell you one thing, see, one good
thing about having him as president of SCEF -- things were so
tumultuous. Fred could always keep his eye on the ball. He always
asked the right questions. I think he kept us from getting on the
wrong track sometimes. I remember when we were setting up what we
called the Southern Mountain project because we did a lot of stuff
for Appalachia, because what we were trying to do in the late
sixties was set up pilot projects that would create some model for
poor white working people and black people organizing together. We
thought we were right about it. We didn't have many resources. We
got a few things done but I think our analysis was right, that the
civil rights movement cracked things open there, that it was
possible, that people wouldn't have dreamed of such a coalition in
the past could see that this was a great opportunity, which I think
was true and is what the Rainbow (Coalition) represents now. So
when we started talking about that, he was in those meetings, and
he was all for it but he said, "Now we're not gonna desert the
blacks while we go organize the white people in the mountains, are
we?" It wasn't just because he was black. That was really astute
because some organizations that went out to organize poor white
people, left the black issue and the black struggles behind. He
was all for the black/white coalition thing. He still is, but he
63
wasn't going to let us get off concentrating on getting to whites
and forget about where the heart of the struggle was. That was
very important, and I think he was right. Well, when we were
trying to get somebody with prestige to come to Greensboro and
people there were scared to death. He lent his name to that and he
was the biggest name we had at the press conference. Other people
came later . But he was there .
ANDREW MANIS: Let me go ahead and get you to sum up your thoughts
in a sense that what do you think his overall significance is in
the movement and if there is another anecdote or an interpretation
that you think that anybody writing this book should at least hear.
ANNE BRADEN: I know I'll think of other things later.
ANDREW MANIS: I realize I'm putting you on the spot to be eloquent
here at the end of the interview and it is rather late for
eloquence.
ANNE BRADEN : Well, before I do that, see, I think the thing that,
see, Fred, even today, he has a basic understanding that what is
going to change history is people at the grass roots moving. Even
though it might not have been a shared leadership sort of thing in
Birmingham at the time of that big mass movement there . He never
thought he could win it by himself. He would go to Phillips High
School with whomever he could get, which wasn't that many people.
He I d have had more if they had gone. He knew it was masses of
people who were going to make the difference. He's never lost that
sort of understanding -- all during the Reagan period. If you
listen to Fred talk - - I mean he comes to SOC work shops, the
64
tenant movement, grass roots sort of people. He'll take time to
talk about what just plain people were able to do in Birmingham.
He always uses that as an example for people now. He i s constantly
applying that to now. But in terms of deciding, assessing what his
significance in history is --
ANDREW MANIS: I understand, that's my job.
ANNE BRADEN: Yeah, but I suppose you think you got to be
objective. I don't know why, but you probably do. So I probably
would put it stronger than you ever would. You see, so much of
that hinges on how you interpret the importance of the black
liberation struggle. To me, it's the key to the whole history of
the country, and to any sort of progress. My theory about our
history is that because this country was built on racism basically,
that it's just built into the system and that is what has corrupted
our freedom and democracy and everything else, but it is also on
the other side of that coin that whenever black people move for
freedom, this is what expands freedom for everybody and moves the
country in a humane direction basically. You can point to
different periods of history, like Reconstruction after the Civil
War, and the more recent times and the sixties, basically, was a
movement toward a more humane society. Then it got pushed back in
the seventies and you had a movement away from the humane values.
So, if you -- I start with the assumption that the key to moving
this country in a humane direction has been that struggle of blacks
for freedom. If you agree with that, then somebody like Fred
Shuttlesworth is a key factor in that movement which moves the
65
country in the direction that I think is right for human beings.
It was an essential factor. There are some things that -- history
is going to move. No one individual makes history and no one
individual made the black struggle, including Martin Luther King.
But there are people that, if they had not been there, that history
might have been a little different. You just can't get away from
that. And I think Fred is probably one of them. If he hadn't been
there, maybe somebody else would have, but if he hadn't been there,
I don't think things would have stayed the way they were in
Birmingham, but they wouldn't have moved as fast and they wouldn't
have moved when they did very likely. If he hadn't had the guts to
stand up we wouldn't have had that big move in Birmingham I don't
think. Eventually some of the same things might have happened, but
I think Birmingham was the key in terms of a turning point at that
particular phase of the struggle, so I think -- maybe he's right,
maybe God did send him to do all that. (Anne Braden laughs).
ANDREW MANIS: Well, it wasn't too late for some last minute
eloquence. Thank you very much for your time.
66